LETTER FROM WASHINGTON
He mentioned Ronald Reagan and ignored Donald Trump. This says both his age and his preference. Mitch McConnell appeared before a largely deserted Senate on February 28 to make an unexpected but logical announcement. At 82, the Republican leader has decided that he will stop leading the group after the presidential election in November, while continuing his mandate. “As long as I breathe on this earth, he said in his Kentucky drawl, I will continue to defend American exceptionalism. » It is exactly for this type of remark, borrowing from traditional conservatism, that the new Trumpist right abhors Mitch McConnell.
“Our hearts go out to our Democratic colleagues in the Senate regarding the retirement of their majority co-leader”, sarcastically wrote the Freedom Caucus group, which brings together several dozen extremist Republican elected officials in the House of Representatives. Their press release slandered the state of which Mitch McConnell was supposedly elected: Ukraine. The veteran Republican, known as a calculating and cold strategist, nevertheless has one absolute conviction: the need to support kyiv militarily in the face of the Russian invasion. Or the exact opposite of the new Republican wave, rejecting even indirect military commitments abroad, like the senator from Ohio, JD Vance.
The announcement of his withdrawal, as of November, opened the race for succession between “the three Johns”, as the American press calls them: Mr. Thune, from South Dakota, Mr. Cornyn, from Texas, and Mr. Barrasso, from Wyoming. Unlike Mitch McConnell, they have already given their support to the big favorite of the Republican primaries, Donald Trump. Will this be enough? The Trumpist elected officials in the Senate, a minority within the minority, are determined to imitate their counterparts in the House: to become central and essential, by blackmailing the contenders for the position.
“We have become a party of losers”
If the first reason for Mitch McConnell’s withdrawal is his very precarious health, not to mention his weariness, it opens the way for the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement to take control of the Republican group in the Senate. McConnell no longer held the troops as in the past, when the Senate wanted to be the enclave of responsible elected officials, ready for bipartisan compromises.
More broadly, in the run-up to the November presidential election, Donald Trump is methodically organizing the submission and purge of the party for his political and financial benefit. It starts with the head. Re-elected in January 2023 for two additional years, Ronna McDaniel, the president of the Republican National Committee (RNC), nevertheless gave in to this MAGA wave and announced her upcoming departure, on March 8. “The RNC has undergone changes, historically, since we had a designated candidate, and it has always been my intention to respect this tradition”, she explained in a press release. However, the Republican convention will not take place until July, the solemn moment when the likely candidate, Donald Trump, will be inducted. It is therefore a hasty and forced departure.
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