Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Norm Ornstein: Always a pleasure, Greg. What a day.
Ornstein: Here’s what we know about Mitch McConnell. One of the signature developments of McConnell’s life was not just his bout with Polio as a younger person but that the scourge of Polio has carried with him for the rest of his life. Just a week ago, he took another fall. Some of those falls have been very dangerous. They’ve led to concussions. He walks haltingly, gingerly—and he knows personally, as well as anybody else, what the polio vaccine did to prevent many, many others going through what he’s gone through.
And the fact [is] Mitch McConnell was the only Republican to vote against him. Susan Collins, Bill Cassidy, a physician from Louisiana who said that the proudest thing about his career as a doctor was protecting Louisiana kids from mayhem and death by getting them vaccinated, Lisa Murkowski—these people and so many more know full well and they all went along.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): Well, I feel sorry for Mitch. And I was one of the people that led. He couldn’t. He wanted to go to the end, and he wanted to say leader. He’s not equipped mentally. He wasn’t equipped 10 years ago mentally, in my opinion. He’d let the Republican Party go to hell. If I didn’t come along, the Republican Party wouldn’t even exist right now. Mitch McConnell never really had it. I was the one that got him to drop out of the leadership position. So he can’t love me. But he’s not voting against Bob, he’s voting against me. But that’s all right. He endorsed me. You know that Mitch endorsed me, right? You think that was easy?
Ornstein: Donald Trump’s way is to viciously attack anybody who doesn’t do his bidding. It doesn’t matter whether they’ve helped him immensely in the past. It doesn’t matter whether they have been key to his success. He will go after you as viciously as possible if you don’t do what he wants or demands. It is a classic tactic of an authoritarian, the classic tactic of a narcissistic sociopath like Donald Trump. So no great surprise here.
Sargent: Very possible. McConnell also voted against Tulsi Gabbard who just got confirmed as director of national intelligence and against Pete Hegseth for defense secretary. Norm, McConnell knows the immense dangers that all these nominees pose to the country, but I think we need to remind people that Mitch McConnell had the chance to prevent Trump from becoming president again. He probably could have gotten the Senate to convict Trump after the second impeachment over January 6. He didn’t. I think that could go down as one of the most consequential failures of any U.S. public official in our lifetimes. Is that overstating it, Norm?
I would say Mitch McConnell, more than anything else during his tenure as majority leader, Republican leader in the Senate, was protecting or trying to secure the majority. And he believed this was a ruthlessly pragmatic judgment with a lot of Republicans up in a party that still had as a cult—the vast majority of Republican voters being pro-Trump—that if he had pushed this, it would have divided Republicans and probably cost him the majority, so he sacrificed the country for this.
Sargent: I want to play some more audio of Trump at his press conference. He was asked by a reporter about Mitch McConnell’s bout with Polio as a young person, as you mentioned earlier. Here’s what happened.
Trump (audio voiceover): I don’t know anything about he had polio.
Trump (audio voiceover): I have no idea if he had polio. All I can tell you about him is that he shouldn’t have been a leader. He knows that. He voted against Bobby. He votes against almost everything now. He’s a very bitter guy. And we have a very strong party. And he’s almost not even really a very powerful member. I’d say he’s not a party, he’s lost his power.
Ornstein: It was interesting, Greg, to take it in a slightly different direction. I watched slack, odd, and appalled when Trump did his press conference after the deadly airplane helicopter crash at a national airport. And it was 30 seconds of the boilerplate that had been written for him offering condolences to those that had been lost, and then it moved into yet another sociopathic rant. Republicans in Congress watching this knew it as well.
It is the mark of a dictator. So much of what we see in what Trump is doing, the playbook is right out of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, goes beyond public humiliation and that’s something, crazy as it is, they have to worry about. I know people who have gotten death threats. I know from pretty reliable sources that Bill Cassidy, the senator from Louisiana, the physician who knows full well how dangerous RFK Jr. is to his own constituents in Louisiana, has a primary challenge from the right when he’s up in 2026. We know that Elon Musk—President Musk we can call him or deputy president, or whatever you want to call him—and other billionaires have said that they will put huge sums of money into these primary challenges, but what I’ve also told is that he and his family have gotten death threats.
Sargent: Norm, if you step back and look at the broader contours of all this, McConnell’s opposition to Hegseth, Gabbard, and RFK shows that he understands what Trumpism really is. He gets that it poses a fundamental threat to the Western alliance: Gabbard and Hegseth are to one degree or another favorably disposed towards Putin; Hegseth just essentially said Ukraine can forget about reclaiming its territory. McConnell also gets that Trump could badly cripple some of the things that make the country great like science, public health, vaccines, etc. Norm, you know Republican senators, many of them privately agree with McConnell about all this, right? It seems like McConnell’s path here says something about the Republican Party. They know this guy is a threat to the country and to the future, but they’re just letting it happen.
There is no backbone. Look at the fact that Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins ended up bending the knee and voted for these characters. I look at what also happened today, which is the vote in the Judiciary Committee in the Senate on Kash Patel. Right before they took that vote, Dick Durbin indicated, something that he had said publicly before, that he had ironclad evidence that Kash Patel had lied under oath to the Judiciary Committee in his confirmation hearing, saying that he had nothing to do with this campaign to fire FBI agents and top figures.
I’m absolutely certain that even though you have on that committee some of the most deplorable members of the Senate, many of them know full well that Kash Patel is not qualified or capable of doing what the nation expects at the FBI, and they still voted for him. And that tells you where this party is. And it tells you that while Trump will continue to do things to send signals that they’d better toe the lie, they would better do what he says no matter how outrageous, they better be muted in their criticisms, there’s no moral backbone that any of them have.
Sargent: Well, Norm, the die is cast now. It’s on. Thanks so much for coming on with us today. I hope it doesn’t get as ugly as it looks like it’s going to.
Sargent: Thanks, Norm, for coming on.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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