The announced retirement of Senator Mitch McConnell, the erstwhile longest-serving Republican leader in Senate history and one of the most consequential lawmakers of his era, was not unexpected. McConnell is among the older members of a largely geriatric Senate—his announcement that he would not seek an eighth term in office came on his eighty-third birthday—and has struggled with a series of health issues in recent years. When McConnell declined to seek the position as Republican leader this past year, instead passing the torch to current Senate Majority Leader John Thune, it was an indication that the self-declared “Grim Reaper” of Democratic priorities was ready to accept a quiet end to a lengthy political career.
But McConnell’s decision is also reflective of political realities that complicate what might have been a straightforward legacy: Even considering his influence in shaping the modern Republican Party, his vision does not represent its future. Despite his significant role in ensuring the election of President Donald Trump in 2016—as well as shepherding some of the president’s greatest legislative victories through Congress during his first term—McConnell is not the avatar of Trumpism. Instead, he is viewed with suspicion by Trump and his allies, including some of those Republican lawmakers that he helped put in office.
“This is not the conference that he took over, but it’s the one he built,” said Republican strategist Liam Donovan.
McConnell was first elected in 1984, the same year that President Ronald Reagan won reelection in an unprecedented landslide victory. More than 40 years later, he will be leaving office at the height of Trump’s power. Reagan can be viewed as a precursor to Trump: an entertainer turned politician who defined the Republican Party of his era, a politician who was willing to fight in the trenches of the culture wars to sway median (and particularly white) voters, and a party leader whose prioritizing of tax cuts is considered a massive achievement among GOP lawmakers to this day.
But Reagan, like McConnell, also believed in a robust American role in the foreign arena and—famously—a desire to counter Russia’s influence. As a Republican politician who sees himself in the Reagan mold, McConnell is one of Ukraine’s staunchest congressional supporters three years after Russia invaded the neighboring country; Trump, meanwhile, has blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for the conflict and is sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
That his career is ending on this final, discordant note might have surprised the younger McConnell. As the bridge between the Reagan revolution and the Trump era, McConnell has his fingerprints on many of the dynamics of the modern political era. He was an avid supporter of loosening campaign finance laws, efforts that culminated in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court case that lifted limits on independent spending by corporations in politics. He made the decision to hold open the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat for eight months ahead of the 2016 election—convincing some on-the-fence conservative voters to hold their noses and vote for Trump, and paving the way for the confirmations of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Four years later, he allowed for the seat vacated by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be filled by Justice Amy Coney Barrett just weeks before the 2020 election, ensuring a conservative supermajority on the court that has issued several Republican-friendly rulings.
There was a brief period of time in which McConnell’s methodical, ruthless political style imbued him with a sort of “folk heroism” among Republicans, said Donovan. McConnell’s willingness to block Obama’s agenda—as well as his Supreme Court nominee—and his efforts in pushing through Trump’s judicial nominees cemented his reputation as a political fighter. McConnell also helped push through the massive tax cuts that became one of Trump’s major legislative achievements in 2017.
“I think [Trump’s] greatest successes ironically occurred when he and McConnell were working together in a sort of transactional way, both on the political side and on the legislative side,” said Donovan.
But their mutual tolerance was not long-lasting: In the wake of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, by a violent mob seeking to overturn the presidential election results, McConnell blamed Trump for the “disgraceful” actions of his supporters during the insurrection; the relationship between the two men has remained frosty in the years since, despite McConnell’s endorsement of Trump’s reelection bid in 2024.
Even with their mutual distaste for each other, McConnell also held an indirect role in ensuring Trump’s political resurrection. In the weeks after the insurrection, McConnell refused to begin the impeachment trial against Trump while he was still in office. In February of that year, McConnell joined nearly all Republicans in voting to acquit Trump, saying that he believed the former president could not be convicted because he was no longer in office. Had Trump been convicted, he would have been ineligible to seek reelection.
In 2022, the final year that McConnell sought reelection as Republican leader, he faced opposition from some members of his conference. Senator Rick Scott led an abortive bid to challenge McConnell, and received support from 10 Republicans. Nonetheless, despite frequent criticism from some of the body’s newer members, McConnell retained a firm grip on his conference. As he has occasionally reminded his members, many Republicans received significant financial support from the Senate Leadership Fund, the McConnell-aligned super PAC dedicated to electing Republican senators. (SLF has been known to provide less support to GOP senators critical of McConnell in their reelection bids.)
Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist who is close with McConnell, compared the senator to a “rock on the beach”: The tide of politics may have changed over the decades that McConnell has been in office, but he himself has not. McConnell has always prioritized winning—even if it meant supporting GOP candidates with whom he might be ideologically misaligned, or those who would later disdain him. Moreover, although McConnell has voted against some of Trump’s nominees in the past month, he has always voted to allow their nomination to advance, and his opposition has not sunk the nomination.
“He never put a litmus test on anybody, other than, ‘Can you win a general election?’ Because he knew that having a Republican majority or having a Republican White House was the most important thing,” said Jennings. “He’s a loyal Republican who wants Republican outcomes, and he knows the way to get outcomes is to win elections.”
This emphasis on outcomes could explain why McConnell has remained relatively supportive of Trump despite personal disdain: According to biographer Michael Tackett, McConnell said after the 2020 election that Trump was “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” a “despicable human being,” and a “narcissist.”
Nonetheless, ensuring Trump’s rise is not enough to secure McConnell’s standing among Republicans. Even in his home state of Kentucky, where he helped the decades-long progression of transforming a relatively Democratic state into a largely ruby-red one, McConnell has faced criticism from his fellow Republicans. The GOP candidates vying to succeed him in the Senate have criticized him for voting against certain Trump nominations, including former state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, once a protégé of McConnell, who has set his sights on his former mentor’s seat.
Jennings, who believes that McConnell belongs on a “Mount Rushmore” of Kentucky politics, predicted that the current prevailing skepticism among many Republicans regarding his legacy is unlikely to last. “Right now he’s going to be viewed more negatively because Donald Trump doesn’t care for him and has made that known,” he said. “But I think the fair reading of his entire career is one of somebody who put … getting Republican Party outcomes, getting conservative outcomes, ahead of almost everything.”
That single-minded focus made McConnell the bane of his critics, particularly since it contributed so significantly to Trump’s rise. In his speech announcing his impending retirement, McConnell highlighted his respect for the Senate as an institution, and the importance of upholding its norms. As majority leader, McConnell subverted one of the long-standing norms of the body in 2017, when Republicans invoked the “nuclear option,” allowing for Supreme Court justices to be confirmed with a simple majority. (Republicans insist that Democrats broke this rule first in 2013 by using the “nuclear option” on lower court nominees.)
McConnell also touted the importance of Congress as laid out in Article 1 of the Constitution, a particularly relevant comment as Trump attempts to use executive orders to cut spending and gut federal agencies in a manner that would historically be left to Congress. Nonetheless, McConnell expressed faith in the future of the institution—the one he helped shape over four decades, and whose resilience may be determined in part by the actions he took during his time in office.
“Regardless of the political storms that may wash over this chamber during the time I have remaining, I assure our colleagues that I will depart with great hope for the endurance of the Senate as an institution,” McConnell said. “The Senate is still equipped for work of great consequence, and, to the disappointment of my critics, I’m still here on the job.”
