Trump’s bare-knuckle fighting style remains
Lost in the nasty war of words between former President Donald Trump and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is how much the pair accomplished during Trump’s presidency.
Together, when Trump was president and McConnell was the Senate majority leader — and when they were friends — the two Republicans remade the nation’s judiciary.
They stocked it with scores of conservative judges — including three on the Supreme Court — who will sit on the bench for a lifetime and oversee a good portion of the federal courts in the country.
Trump nominated more judges in his four years in office than any president in the past 40 years, all of whom were approved by McConnell and the then-Republican majority in the Senate.
As he left office Trump was successful in naming some 230 so-called Article III judges to the federal bench — that is to the Supreme Court, the U.S. courts of appeals, the U.S. district courts and the U.S. Court of International Trade.
Despite his defeat by Joe Biden, Trump’s conservative impact on the court will be felt for years to come.
Thanks to McConnell all were confirmed by the Senate despite ferocious Democrat opposition.
So pleased was Trump with McConnell, especially after the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, that he lavishly praised the Kentucky senator. Trump later raised money and campaigned for McConnell in his home state.
After Kavanaugh was confirmed, Trump said of McConnell, “There’s nobody tougher. There’s nobody smarter. He refused to cave to the radical Democrats’ shameful campaign of personal and political destruction.”
That was long before Trump’s claims of a rigged election, the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot, Trump’s second impeachment by House Democrats, and his second acquittal by the Senate.
. Now, according to Trump, McConnell “is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.” Not only that, “he doesn’t have what it takes, never did, never will.”
While McConnell voted for acquittal on Constitutional grounds, he later launched a bitter attack on Trump, who he blamed for instigating followers to riot at the Capitol.
He accused Trump of a “disgraceful dereliction of duty.” He said, “These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags, and screaming their loyalty to him.”
McConnell had to know that when you go after Trump, a New York dirty street fighter, you will be scorched in return. McConnell may have gone low, but Trump went lower.
Trump being Trump, the former president, apropos of nothing, also threw McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao under the bus by accusing McConnell of having no credibility on China because of “his family’s substantial Chinese business holdings.”
The Chao family owns Foremost Group, an international shipping company.
As he once praised McConnell, Trump gushed over Chou’s “amazing life story” when he appointed her as his secretary of transportation. At the time, Chou answered questions of conflict by saying, “My family are patriotic Americans who have led purpose-driven lives and contributed much to this country.”
Her sister Angela, who runs Foremost, was even more blunt. In a response to a critical New York Times story, Angela Chou said, “We are an international shipping company, and I’m an American. I don’t think that, if I didn’t have a Chinese face, there would be any of this focus on China.”
In one of his last appointments, a month before leaving office, Trump named Elaine Chou as a trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Chou, who was secretary of labor in the Bush administration, ended up on Trump’s hit list, however, when she became the first Trump cabinet member to resign in protest a day after the Capitol riot.
While the unseemly and angry feud between McConnell and Trump may have caused consternation among some, there is no doubt that Trump, despite his rabid rhetoric, is still the leader of the Republican Party.
The GOP is, in fact, still his party. And while there will be other Republicans interested in running for president in 2024, they will have to go through Trump first — if he is not a candidate himself.
There is no excuse, of course, for Trump’s rough language. Yet it is who he is. It was language that got him elected president in 2016 and, after Joe Biden crashes, as he surely will, it may get him elected again. He did not act very presidential when he was president, so why would start now?