One is the loneliest number, and on Thursday Mitch McConnell, the former Republican leader of the US Senate, found himself very alone among his peers.
It stood to McConnell and McConnell alone among Republican senators to vote against the nomination of Robert F Kennedy jnr as health secretary. Earlier this week, he also stood in splendid isolation in his No vote for Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Three weeks ago, he provoked the anger of the Maga establishment by voting no to Pete Hegseth, the controversial defence secretary pick.
Of all three No votes, it’s unquestionable that McConnell found the nomination of Kennedy to be the most objectionable. McConnell was born in 1942 in Alabama. Two years later, while his father was fighting in the second World War, McConnell contracted polio, leaving him with paralysis in his left leg.
His mother spent the following two years making sure he got the requisite treatment. But the virus left its mark: he could not run as freely as other children and his left leg was narrower than his right. In 2020, he recalled that time in an interview as the United States was closing down in advance of the Covid-19 pandemic, praising his good luck in having a mother “who was determined to see me walk again. My mother instilled all that in me before I was four years old and I think it’s been a guiding principle in how I lead my life.”
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On Thursday, he offered a scalding repudiation of RFK’s suitability to be the leading health official in US life, saying: “I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”
Across in the Oval Office, the mention of McConnell brought a storm cloud over Donald Trump’s otherwise happy day of announcing retaliatory tariffs, riffing on the Ukraine-Russia peace deal and musing about whether Elon Musk had met Indian prime minister Narendra Modi in his Doge capacity or in his other life, as the richest man on the planet.
“Mitch McConnell never really had it,” Trump said.
“He’s not equipped mentally. He wasn’t equipped 10 years ago mentally, in my opinion. He’d let the Republican Party go to hell. If I didn’t come along, the Republican Party wouldn’t even exist right now.”
[ US Senate confirms Robert F Kennedy jnr as secretary of healthOpens in new window ]
McConnell has been a senator since 1985. He is the longest-serving party leader in US political history. He was twice named among Time’s 100 most influential and was famously branded “the most important Republican since Ronald Reagan”.
Now, at 82, he stands as a singular protest voice within a party that is unrecognisable to many Reagan-era observers. The integrity of McConnell’s belief in his votes against Trump’s picks is not at issue. But the votes also represent the closing phases of their relationship, turbulent during the first Trump presidency and poisoned after the January 6th Capitol riots. And that event will perpetually tie the two men when the histories are written.
Even before the events of that day, McConnell had branded the outgoing president “a despicable human being” in an interview with an oral historian. January 6th shocked him to his core and he would later say: “It’s hard to imagine this happening in this country, such a stable democracy we’ve had for so long, to have not only the system attacked but the building itself attacked.”
Of the rioters, he would say: “They were narcissistic, just like Donald Trump, sitting in the vice-president’s chair taking pictures of themselves.”
But when the Senate vote to impeach Trump came around, McConnell voted against. The belief, which will become mythology in the years to come, was that the Kentucky senator could have used his legendary vote-whipping reputation to acquire the nine additional Republicans needed to convict their former president, barring him from holding any office again. He would thus have changed the course of history.
The most generous view of his stance then is that he believed – as many did then that Trump was a spent political force, an electoral experiment that had failed. This was, of course, spectacularly wrong. In March of last year, he endorsed Trump’s nomination as Republican candidate for the presidency. But the Maga faithful never forgave him for his post-January 6th comments. And it’s not as if Democrats have given him any credit: McConnell remains the lowest-ranked senator in all leading approval rating polls.
His recent show of rebellion is an attempt to put as much distance between himself and the new Trump administration as possible. He has one eye on history. But when history was watching, on that impeachment vote day, McConnell either baulked or made the wrong calculation. Many will see that as his defining, tragic legacy.
