Mitch McConnell Is Trump’s Judge and Jury
Will He Also Be His Executioner?
Donald Trump’s presidency has been seen to hinge on his ability to engender [take your pick] personal or party loyalty, servility, transactional greed, fear, or some combination of these traits of no less than 34 of the 53 Republicans in the United States Senate. That’s been the conventional wisdom. But conventional wisdom can be wrong.
Even though many, perhaps even most, of the GOP senators do not like Trump, they’ve not been willing to risk their individual necks opposing him despite his escalating instability, unpredictability, antics, and scandals. The reasoning goes that they’d never vote to remove him from office. Like in the scene in The Untouchables where Robert DiNiro’s Al Capone circles the large table where his lieutenants are seated before stopping behind one of the men and beating his head to a pulp with a baseball bat — none of the senators wants to be ‘that guy’ who’s savagely sacrificed as an example to keep the rest in line.
That’s only true to a point. That point is Mitch McConnell.
Trump’s Senate firewall has far more to do with how the Senate Majority Leader sees the political panorama than it does any devotion to or fear of Trump. What matters most to McConnell is keeping the Senate in Republican hands, not keeping Donald…
