Thanks to Donald Trump’s two-month post-election meltdown, culminating with his incitement of the Capitol storming that resulted in five dead and 140 injured, the former president’s legacy will likely be blurred beyond comprehension, at least as far as lasting policy accomplishments go. But as for such accomplishments, nearly every domestic success was uniquely enabled by Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader demoted to minority leader thanks to Trump throwing away the Georgia Senate runoffs in favor of his election lies.
Without the abominable last two months of his presidency, Trump’s legacy, at least the good parts, would look something like this: a conservative remaking of the federal judiciary, including an originalist hold on the Supreme Court for a generation; a sweeping tax reform package that crucially capped the state and local tax deduction and brought jobs back home by lowering our corporate tax rate to near the average for the developed world; a landmark criminal justice reform bill; and a complete paradigm shift of our foreign policy, inculcating peace in the Middle East and getting tough on China.
All but the last of these accomplishments were possible only because McConnell, whom Trump just described as “a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack,” was “a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack” capable of ramming Trump’s agenda through despite razor-thin control of the Senate.
Naturally, Trump’s first statement responding to his second impeachment acquittal was devoted to lambasting the Kentucky senator for insufficient sycophancy. Among other things, Trump claims he saved McConnell’s Senate seat (McConnell won by 20 points), his Senate control (Trump’s lies about rigged elections sank the turnout in Georgia that would have actually saved the Senate), and that McConnell “has no credibility on China because of his family’s substantial Chinese business holdings.” (This would insinuate, by the way, that Trump chose his own transportation secretary, McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, despite believing she was compromised by a hostile foreign power.)
Sure, Trump can be mad that McConnell excoriated him as the cause of the Capitol storming. But that doesn’t make it any less true. And, despite Trump’s desire to rewrite history, there is zero chance that if Kevin McCarthy or Matt Gaetz were in charge of the Senate that Trump would have gotten a fraction of the judicial confirmations passed that McConnell did, much less the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Trump owes whatever good remains of his legacy to McConnell, and any amount of public catharsis on Trump’s part won’t change that.
