Mitch McConnell’s Big Mistake Defending Donald Trump? Listening to Him.
The first crack in Donald Trump’s red wall came on Christmas Eve when not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse, except for Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski who said she was “disturbed” by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s promise of “total coordination” with Donald Trump in his impeachment trial in the Senate. “It’s wrong to pre-judge,” she said of McConnell working “hand-in-glove” with Trump.
Straightforward and conscientious, so press-reluctant her name auto-corrects to “Murrow skis,” the daughter of a former governor breaking publicly with McConnell is like her donning a lampshade and popping open the champagne on New Year’s Eve. When she opposed the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, rather than dramatize her struggle—by contrast to Sen. Susan Collins, who went on about how hard it all was but finally voted as Trump told her to—Murkowski voted “present.” It didn’t change the outcome—Kavanaugh’s approval was in the bag—but by going against Trump and McConnell she stayed true to her conscience, something the rest of her caucus lost in 2016, bearing out Sen. Lindsey Graham’s warning to his party that by nominating Trump, “We will get destroyed… and we will deserve it.”
Murkowski wouldn’t have gone so far as to be “disturbed” had McConnell not committed one of the few mistakes of his political life in no longer simply doing everything Trump tells him to do but doing it the way Trump tells him to. McConnell, left to his own devices, wouldn’t have revealed that “Everything I do during this [trial] I’m coordinating with White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president’s position and our position.”