Donald Trump has been back in office one month, and his job-approval ratings are his highest ever – but lower than for any new president in polling history (except for him in 2017). That caveat doesn’t temper dismay among Democrats and other Trump critics who can’t understand why more Americans don’t realize or care that he is wrecking or warping much of the government and making fundamental changes in foreign policies that have made our nation the leader of the world for 80 years.
Recall that Trump’s stock in trade is simple answers to complex problems, and that the first month of his second term has focused on attacking things many voters have long found unpopular: illegal immigration, key to his elections; foreign aid, interruptions of which are killing people and weakening America’s case overseas; and government itself, which is widely viewed as inefficient, wasteful, prone to corruption and out of touch.
Much of what the administration says about government is off base; 11 of its 12 claims about the Agency for International Development are misleading, lacking context, or outright wrong, says Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler. But such traditional news sources are being out-shouted by the pro-Trump media system that tells his followers what they want to hear.
So, it’s a frustrating time for Democrats, who can’t figure out how to get leverage when Republicans are distressingly compliant to Trump and the only major obstacle to autocracy seems to be the courts – along with the hope that Trump won’t defy judicial orders and cause a constitutional crisis.
In the absence of a strategy, many Trump critics spend time blaming his return on Sen. Mitch McConnell and what they call his failure to get Trump convicted on impeachment for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and then disqualify him from holding office.
That is a charge not proven. It relies mainly on the McConnell mythology that the Senate’s longest-serving party leader, who kept a Supreme Court seat vacant for 14 months, surely could have persuaded nine more Republicans to vote against Trump. Only seven did, and 17 were needed to reach the 67 needed for conviction. McConnell said Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the insurrection but voted against conviction, using the unproven legal theory that impeachment is not constitutional after an officeholder leaves office.
From the start, McConnell called the vote one of conscience, on which he didn’t try to persuade any colleagues. Then he told his latest biographer, Michael Tackett, that he couldn’t have gotten to 67.
Could he have done it? “It’s the great what-if of our time,” Jonathan Martin, top columnist for Politico, told me. “My guess is he would have had a shot, but it would have been difficult . . . especially a month later.” (McConnell rejected then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s call to reconvene Congress for impeachment and a quick trial during Trump’s final week in office.) I agree with Martin, based on the number of Republicans in Trump states who ran for re-election in 2022, and polling in the days after Jan. 6.
Polls showed Republicans’ approval of McConnell and then-Vice President Mike Pence, Trump’s main target on Jan. 6, fell sharply, but Trump lost just a few points. Senators could see he still had a grip on their voters, and it would have taken an all-out effort by McConnell to get nine votes to go with his own.
If he had fallen short, Trump supporters would have ruled the Republican caucus by more than 2-1, with Trump still eligible to run and exercise great influence. That’s not a recipe for remaining as leader, or regaining a majority in the 2022 midterm elections. And if he had succeeded, having almost two-thirds of his caucus opposed to him on such an elemental issue would have caused similar problems.
That said, I wish my senior senator had been willing to risk his political imperatives for the sake of the country. But he thought the Democrats would “take care of the son of a bitch for us,” as he said early on the morning of Jan. 7. That was a lost gamble – ironically, due to Merrick Garland, whom he kept off the court.
If McConnell didn’t realize then that Trump is an existential threat to the republic as we have known it, I hope he does now. He’s no longer Republican leader, but an intellectual force among GOP senators and chairs the defense appropriations subcommittee, where he says he will resist Trump’s isolationist impulses.
He has long favored foreign aid, as does then-Trump defense secretary James Mattis, who said “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”
So, as Democrats look for some sort of counterforce to Trump, they should wish their old adversary McConnell well. He turned 83 on Thursday.
I don’t wish him well. I hope his conscience tortures him for the remainder of his life. He may or may not have been able to get the necessary Republican votes to impeach Trump, but he said himself that it was a vote of conscience. He voted against impeachment!! Where was his conscience then?? Lost to his ambition to retain power!! He wanted Democrats to do the dirty work for him. He was too cowardly to try to force his Republican colleagues to take care of their own dirty work, the mess that they created. I find it supremely ironic that he sacrificed everything – his conscience, the good of the country to gain personal power and power for his party- and now that party has cast him aside because he would not give in completely to the autocratic force that he helped foster and generate. His great accomplishment in stacking the Supreme Court with Right wing ideologues has removed the barriers that would prevent Trump’s unconstitutional attack on our government by placing him above the law. I hope he is tortured by that every day of his life!!
Sen. McConnell’s legacy will be his duplicity and Donald Trump.
The Democrats have proven to be ineffective against Trump. If they have a candidate that could beat Trump they’re keeping it a secret. I think it’s time to create a new Freedom Party that more represents a majority of US voters which can win the next election as the New Republican Party did by running Abraham Lincoln in a time of division
The problem isn’t that they don’t have a candidate that could defeat Trump. There are plenty of them from the governors of Michigan and Pennsylvania to our own Governor, Andy Beshear. The problem is that the governing elders of the Party just behaved stupidly. Joe Biden should have stepped aside in November of 2023, not in July 2024. His family and his close advisers had to know that he was incapable of continuing and yet they kept that information from the public. They then selected Kamala Harris to run. The Democratic Party voters had no say in the matter. It’s hard to accuse Trump of being anti-democratic when you behave in such an anti-democratic manner yourself. Had Kamala had to go through a Primary vetting cycle she would have either failed to win the nomination or would have emerged a stronger candidate as a result. It would have least forced her to separate herself from Biden who was massively unpopular. The Democratic Party twice has chosen the only two Democratic Party candidates that Trump could defeat.
Al, please do some more thinking about what you have said. As you said McConnell used a theory to justify voting to not impeach. He was the strongest political voice in the entire Congress and in “my opinion”, could have led enough colleagues to impeach.
Keep writing and use your influence to help us build the Democratic Party to be what it can be.