Mitch McConnell is standing in his office smiling. Hanging on the walls are faces, mostly stern, from Washington’s past. McConnell’s portrait might soon join them. Last month, the Republican leader in the US Senate stepped down from the role he has held for longer than anyone in US political history. At the age of 82, McConnell is “ready to do something else”.
A pivotal politician in a tumultuous time, McConnell earned power and used it to shift the country to the right during his 17-year tenure. He won races across the country, raised more than $1bn to boost his colleagues and negotiated trillion-dollar-plus bills, including the aid that lifted the country out of the pandemic. He became enormously influential and broadly unpopular, making enemies among Democrats for blocking judicial nominations to the Supreme Court and among Republicans for his occasional, sharp criticisms of Donald Trump. With the latter preparing to return to the White House next month, the veteran lawmaker issues a warning from America’s past. “We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before world war two,” he says. “Even the slogan is the same. ‘America First.’ That was what they said in the ’30s.”
Warming to his historical theme, McConnell turns to one of the portraits behind him, an influential Senate Republican of the wartime era named Robert A Taft. Son of the 27th president William Howard Taft, Robert was “a raging isolationist” who opposed Lend-Lease before the second world war and both the creation of Nato and the Marshall Plan afterwards, says McConnell. “Thank goodness Eisenhower beat him for the [presidential] nomination in ’52 and had a much different view of America’s role in the world.”