We all suffer for Mitch McConnell’s Trump sycophancy

These are the wages of sycophancy.

For more than four years, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the Senate majority leader, enabled and normalized Donald Trump. He didn’t join other Republicans in trying to oust Trump as the nominee in 2016 after the “Access Hollywood” tapes. He hesitated to side with Republicans who condemned Trump’s friendly words for neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.

McConnell blocked witnesses from appearing at Trump’s impeachment trial and boasted that he ran the trial “in total coordination” with the White House. He supported Trump’s plan to build an “emergency” border wall without congressional consent. He averted his gaze as Trump trampled legislative powers, staffing his administration with unconfirmed “acting” officials, shunning congressional subpoenas and circumventing Congress with executive orders.

McConnell blocked bipartisan efforts to protect against a repeat of foreign election interference after Russia helped Trump in 2016. And he held off on acknowledging President- elect Joe Biden’s win for six weeks, helping Trump to foment the fruitless coup d’etat attempt that will occur on the Senate floor today.

Were it not for McConnell’s efforts to rally big Republican contributors behind Trump, there probably wouldn’t be a President Trump. Never-Trump Republican operative Stuart Stevens, a former George W. Bush and Mitt Romney adviser, calls McConnell “Trump’s Franz von Papen,” the German politician who dissolved the Weimar Republic.

Now McConnell supposes he can turn all that off. He’s telling Senate colleagues not to reject the electoral college results today – not because it’s an inherently authoritarian act but because he doesn’t want Republicans to face a “terrible vote”– either against Trump or against constitutional democracy. He told them the Jan. 6 vote would be “the most consequential I have ever cast.”

But McConnell is powerless to stop the Trump adulation he fueled for so long. Egged on by

Trump, a dozen Republican senators – a quarter of the GOP caucus – have defied McConnell and said they will vote to reject the electoral college results, in effect authorizing a bloodless coup.

And Trump now berates his longtime lap dog as weak and ungrateful. “Mitch & the Republicans do NOTHING . . . NO FIGHT!” he tweeted. Trump shared an article reporting, “Trump allies slam Mitch McConnell for congratulating Biden.” To “Mitch,” Trump added a message: “People are angry!”

Republicans worry the fracturing of the GOP will have cost the party two Senate seats (and with them, control of the Senate) in Tuesday’s runoff elections in Georgia, particularly after Trump called Georgia’s (Republican) secretary of state to say he wants him to “find” an additional 11,780 votes for Trump in November’s results. Neither Republican candidate in Georgia took issue with Trump’s request to falsify the vote tally.

Republicans say they need control of the Senate to be a check on Biden. But they’re acting now as a check on democracy.

Even if Republicans win in Georgia, McConnell’s Trump toadyism has left him atop a GOP caucus in which a substantial proportion no longer accepts the central tenet of democracy: that we honor the results of elections. How can democracy function if one side proposes (even symbolically) rejecting the people’s votes?

Trump, of course, was only ever in it for himself – as seen in the way he has turned against stalwart allies who acknowledged Biden’s obvious win. Another Trump enabler, Sen. John Thune, S.D., is now, in Trump’s telling, “Mitch’s boy” and a “RINO,” Republican in Name Only. The Republican governors of Georgia and Arizona, both longtime Trump boosters, also get Trump’s RINO label now. Trump turned against his own attorney general for affirming Biden’s victory, and he even threatened a fervent loyalist, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., for declining to participate in Wednesday’s clownish overthrow attempt.

For weeks, McConnell humored Trump’s refusal to accept the election results. McConnell declined to refer to Biden as “president- elect.” He voted against a resolution from the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies – because it affirmed Biden’s election. He remained silent as Trump alleged the FBI and Justice Department were conspiring against him.

We probably could have avoided this moment if McConnell hadn’t made the cynical calculation long ago that embracing Trump would best serve his own political ambitions. We could have avoided it if McConnell had the courage of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney (who called the election- overthrow attempt an “egregious ploy”), Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse (“bad for the country”), Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney (“exceptionally dangerous precedent”), Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey (“wildly inappropriate”) or former House speaker Paul Ryan (“difficult to conceive of a more anti- democratic and anti- conservative act”).

But McConnell didn’t have the courage. And now, regardless of what happened in Georgia Tuesday, we all suffer for his sycophancy.