Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is being forced to reckon with former President Donald Trump’s hold on the GOP three years after voting against an impeachment effort that would have made him ineligible for a second term.
The top Senate Republican famously stopped taking Trump’s calls as he refused to give up his push to overturn the 2020 election results. Their relationship has been in disrepair ever since — despite McConnell refusing to support Democrats’ second impeachment effort against him after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
McConnell helped block Trump’s impeachment trial from reaching a guilty verdict, saying at the time that he would have “carefully considered” the articles had the former president still been in office because he was “practically and morally responsible” for provoking the riot. The Senate vote was 57 for “guilty” and 43 votes for “not guilty” on Feb. 13, 2021, falling short of 67 votes needed to convict Trump.
McConnell voted “not guilty” and did not urge his colleagues to convict. The decision by the top Republican to oppose the impeachment when Trump was his most vulnerable cost the 10 additional GOP votes needed to bar Trump from any political return permanently.
“Obviously, in hindsight, it was a miscalculation,” said Grant Reeher, professor of political science at Syracuse University. “If you go back to 2020, I get what [McConnell was] thinking. He’s thinking this is going to run its course, that what he did on Jan. 6, we’re going to look back on this, people are gonna want to move on and turn the page, and they didn’t. That was a miscalculation.”
“The miscalculation was just Trump’s ability to weather things like that,” Reeher added.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans whipped their members on the 2021 impeachment vote. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) said at the time that he agreed with McConnell’s assertion that the vote was “an issue of conscience.”
“We will, of course, try to find out how members feel,” the No. 2 Senate Democrat said. “But in terms of arm-twisting, when it comes to impeachment, you just don’t do that.”
Some Republicans are questioning that decision as Trump cements his position as the party’s likely presidential nominee.
“I think a lot of people in Congress, good friends of mine, who would take the vote back if they could, because I think a lot of these members of Congress, on the second impeachment, they thought Trump was dead,” former House Speaker Paul Ryan said in December. “They thought after Jan. 6 he wasn’t going to have a comeback.”
“He was dead, so they figured, ‘I’m not going to take this heat, vote against this impeachment because he’s gone anyway,’” he continued. “But what’s happened is he’s been resurrected. There’s lots of reasons for that. But he has been. So I think there’s a lot of people who already regret not getting him out of the way when they could have.”
“My colleagues have to live with their own decision,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), one of the seven GOP senators who voted to impeach, told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday when asked if she regrets that her colleagues did not do the same.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), another Trump foe, said when asked if he thought it a mistake that his party opposed impeachment after Jan. 6: “Certainly that was my point of view. But other people voted their conscience. I voted mine. I don’t think it was a political calculation. I think people made an assessment of whether he was guilty of an offense that violated the constitutional standard.”
McConnell, who declined to comment, made a legal argument in 2021 that Trump couldn’t be convicted because he left office.
“By the strict criminal standard, the president’s speech probably was not incitement,” McConnell said after voting to acquit. “However, in the context of impeachment, the Senate might have decided this was acceptable shorthand for the reckless actions that preceded the riot. But in this case, that question is moot. Because former President Trump is constitutionally not eligible for conviction.”
One senior political consultant, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that getting McConnell to support Trump’s impeachment would be the equivalent of getting a small dog to jump over Niagara Falls.
“The suggestion that McConnell of all people would engage in that type of political suicide mission is completely unrealistic,” the consultant told the Washington Examiner.
Scott Jennings, a longtime McConnell adviser, emphatically rejected the idea that McConnell miscalculated Trump’s power in the GOP by opposing his conviction in the Senate, instead saying that the GOP leader was focused on his members.
“It is McConnell’s job to know where his conference is on any given issue at any given time,” Jennings told the Washington Examiner. “In that particular case, I think it was pretty obvious by the time the vote rolled around where most of the Republicans had decided to be.”
“The idea that any congressional leader can snap their fingers and force every member of their conference to do anything at any given time is the amateur-hour view of how Congress works,” Jennings said.
The Senate GOP conference has many centrist and establishment Republicans with penchants for bipartisanship. Several of Trump’s GOP skeptics were able to develop decent working relationships with the former president while in office, though a number of those have since deteriorated.
Trump’s refusal to accept his 2020 election loss and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that ensued left his standing with most Senate Republicans in near disrepair. Republicans went on to blame Trump for the party’s incumbents losing runoff races in Georgia, handing Democrats control of the Senate.
The former president’s GOP detractors grew more critical after Republicans underperformed in the 2022 midterm elections, only retaking the House by a slim margin and failing to regain Senate control.
McConnell is not among the more than half of Republican senators who have endorsed Trump’s 2024 bid. He has committed to not weighing in on the presidential primary this cycle. That hasn’t stopped him from allowing Trump to weigh in on major policy matters being debated by the conference, including in ways that could derail McConnell’s personal priorities, such as passing the defense supplemental spending bill.
A bipartisan working group of senators has spent months negotiating a border security deal, which would be added to a foreign spending bill that includes aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Negotiators on both sides have acknowledged that the border measure is critical to passing the legislation through both chambers.
McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have put on a united front to pass the supplemental. McConnell, who has been Ukraine’s staunchest GOP ally, has said he supports the larger supplemental bill as long as it includes “credible” border policy changes.
The two have been in lockstep on supporting the effort to combine Israel and Ukraine aid. They have also backed the inclusion of border security, though they differ on specifics, as a means to push the bill through both chambers. Taiwan assistance was additionally included to help broaden support for the bill.
The top Senate Republican had been urging his members to get on board with the bill because he did not believe Democrats would agree to any border reforms if ousted from the White House in November.
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While more than half of the 49 GOP senators support some type of continued aid to Ukraine, there is a vocal part of the conference that strongly opposes such measures. There is also the matter of Trump, who has significant sway with House Republicans and has begun urging GOP lawmakers to oppose the deal.
Trump’s influence appeared to have affected McConnell, who described him to GOP colleagues as the party’s likely nominee whose viewpoints merited recognition. The comments prompted furor and confusion around the Senate, leading McConnell to tell his members that he had not abandoned the bill at Trump’s request.
