McConnell and the President are not a natural pair. A former Trump Administration official, who has also worked in the Senate, observed, “It would be hard to find two people less alike in temperament in the political arena. With Trump, there’s rarely an unspoken thought. McConnell is the opposite—he’s constantly thinking but says as little as possible.” The former Administration official went on, “Trump is about winning the day, or even the hour. McConnell plays the long game. He’s sensitive to the political realities. His North Star is continuing as Majority Leader—it’s really the only thing for him. He’s patient, sly, and will obfuscate to make less apparent the ways he’s moving toward a goal.” The two men also have different political orientations: “Trump is a populist—he’s not just anti-élitist, he’s anti-institutionalist.” As for McConnell, “no one with a straight face would ever call him a populist—Trump came to drain the swamp, and now he’s working with the biggest swamp creature of them all.”
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As a backbench senator, McConnell used his fund-raising talents to rise in the Party’s leadership—a path laid out by Lyndon Johnson. Robert A. Caro, the author of a magisterial four-volume biography of Johnson, told me that, “in a stroke of genius,” Johnson, as a Democratic junior congressman, “realizes he has no power, but he has something no other congressman has—the oilmen and big contractors in Texas who need favors in Washington.” By establishing control over the distribution of the donors’ money, Johnson acquired immense power over his peers. ...
McConnell, like L.B.J., used fund-raising to help allies and punish enemies. “What he’s done behind the scenes is apply the thing that speaks louder in Washington, D.C., than anything else—money,” Wilson, the former Republican consultant, said. “Suddenly, Susan Collins gets a bridge in Maine. Lisa Murkowski suddenly gets a harbor. Oh, what a coincidence!” McConnell has a brilliant grasp of his caucus members’ needs, and he helps them protect their seats with tens of millions of dollars in campaign donations and federal grants, some of which come through Chao’s Department of Transportation. [Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao is his wife] (A department spokesman says that there is no political linkage, and that every state gets some money.) McConnell also lets his caucus members take the spotlight, and, when he can, he allows them to skip votes that will be unpopular with their constituents. In private, McConnell can be bitingly funny, as well as sentimental—he has been known to tear up over an aide’s departure—but he is shrewdly guarded, reportedly subscribing to the maxim “You can’t get in trouble for what you don’t say.” He takes care to cover his tracks, putting private notes in his pocket rather than tossing them into Senate wastebaskets. And he protects his allies. In 2013, McConnell’s lieutenants—who are known as Team Mitch—established a policy of blackballing anyone who works against an incumbent member of his caucus. Recently, in a Georgia Senate race, consultants working for the Republican congressman Doug Collins were warned that they would be frozen out for helping him challenge Kelly Loeffler, the incumbent, who is McConnell’s choice in the primary, despite recent accusations against her of insider trading. (Loeffler denies wrongdoing.) Insubordination can result in what a former Trump White House official calls the Death Penalty: the President is told that the miscreant will not be confirmed by the Senate for any Administration job.
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