Donald Trump presumably liked it when US Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell voted to acquit him because the senator believes impeachment of a former president is unconstitutional. But Trump had a very different reaction to McConnell’s floor speech on Saturday, when he rightly said the former president was “practically and morally responsible for provoking” the January 6 assault on the Capitol and for failing to denounce the violence while it was under way.
On Wednesday (AEDT) Trump attacked McConnell at length, insulting him as a “dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack” who lacked “political insight, wisdom, skill, and personality” and “doesn’t have what it takes, never did, and never will”. That was reportedly the toned-down version.
Trump’s aides may high-five each other over their rhetorical excesses, but they’ll never convince McConnell’s Democratic adversaries or Republican senatorial admirers that Trump’s slurs are accurate. (Though some might concede McConnell is something less than a sparkling conversationalist at dinner parties.)
Since the Senate’s first meeting in March 1789, only a handful of leaders have demonstrated a mastery of the upper chamber that matches the bespectacled Kentuckian’s. His achievements are legion, including skilfully manoeuvring Trump’s legislative accomplishments and judicial appointments through the Senate.
The former president also said McConnell lacked “credibility on China because of his family’s Chinese business holdings”. This smear was aimed at McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, whose Taiwanese-American family runs a shipping company active in the Pacific. Neither Chao nor McConnell owns stock in the New York-based business and, it’s worth noting, wasn’t concerned about all this when he made Chao his transportation secretary.
In his statement, Trump even blamed McConnell for losing two Georgia Senate seats in January 5 runoffs because the senator had endorsed $US600 ($774) stimulus cheques rather than matching the Democrats’ offer of $US2000. Nice try, but Trump’s own Treasury secretary floated the $US600 stimulus check idea on December 8. Instead of stopping him, Trump waited until after Republicans had lined up behind his administration’s proposal to announce, on December 22, that he supported $US2000 cheques. The Georgia Republican senators looked like contortionists as they fell in behind the president’s last-minute change of mind.
Trump lost those Georgia seats by making his campaign appearances there not about the need for cheques and balances on the incoming Biden administration, but instead about his rage over losing the presidential election.
As a FiveThirtyEight analysis found: “The better Trump did in a county in November, the more its turnout tended to drop in the runoffs.” Enough of the former president’s most fervent supporters believed him that Georgia elections were rigged and determined it wasn’t worth voting. The result? Democrats won both races and control of the Senate.
In suggesting that Senate Republicans oust McConnell, Trump is setting himself up for defeat. McConnell won’t be removed and replaced with a Trump toady. The former president’s screed will leave him appearing weaker while the Kentucky senator shows that Friedrich Nietzsche (and Kelly Clarkson) was right: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Trump may not be fully aware of shifting currents among congressional Republicans. More members now admit privately that Trump had no coat-tails in the November election. Especially in the suburbs, some Republicans and many GOP-leaning independents refused to take his lawn signs or support him. That’s why so many Republican congressional candidates ran ahead of the former president.
Trump crowed on Wednesday that he “received the most votes of any sitting president in history”. Then again, Joe Biden received more votes than any candidate in history — and seven million more votes than Trump.
Despite possessing all the powers of incumbency and leading a united GOP, Trump lost the presidency. If he returned for another White House contest, leading a divided party at war with itself and out of power, he’d be wiped out.
Trump should now be focused not on settling scores, but on healing, uniting and expanding the GOP. Politics is about addition, not subtraction. So next time his crackerjack wordsmiths suggest a thermonuclear attack on other Republicans, Trump ought to let the one-day story that provoked them go away on its own. But then he wouldn’t be Donald Trump, would he?
Karl Rove, a former aide to US president George W. Bush, helped organise the political-action committee American Crossroads and is author of The Triumph of William McKinley
The Wall Street Journal
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