It didn’t spare the former Senate leader from a rebuke, however: On Thursday, Trump told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in a White House gaggle that McConnell was a “very bitter man” and “not equipped mentally”, a label he said applied to the last 10 years of McConnell’s career.
McConnell, 82, is going by the same playbook he did during Donald Trump’s first presidency and his ensuing political resurrection — offering token resistance to the man who took over his party while providing political cover for his allies in the GOP Senate caucus.
But second, it serves to give John Thune (one of his close allies and the new Senate majority leader) the political capital and the votes he needs to ram Trump’s nominees through the Senate with minimal defections.
McConnell, once the Senate GOP leader, has now voted against Trump more times than any Republican senator in the current Congress — a careful play, not an accident.
More than anything else, it’s a position of deliberate weakness: McConnell is choosing to cast votes on the losing side, something he never would have done as Senate leader with a Republican majority in the chamber.
