Don't Forget to Blame Mitch McConnell for the Coronavirus Crisis

[babylonsister]

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/mitch-mcconnell-donald-trump-coronavirus

Don’t Forget to Blame Mitch McConnell for the Coronavirus Crisis
More than anyone, the Senate majority leader enabled Trump, whose reckless leadership has made the covid-19 crisis much worse than it had to be.
By Bess Levin
April 13, 2020


Something you’ve probably heard once or twice over the last month is that the coronavirus crisis in the United States is significantly worse than it had to be thanks to the leadership style of Donald Trump, the pillars of which include ignoring experts, not reading his briefing materials, and thinking that he, a man who can’t pronounce the word “Nevada,” is some kind of genius. Applied to the current situation, that meant downplaying the deadly virus even as it engulfed China and other parts of the world; refusing to “do anything” throughout January and February, despite dire warnings coming from his own officials; and not pushing for testing because he thought the numbers would hurt his reelection chances. And listening to the advice of his equally dim son-in-law. And focusing on the stock market instead of the actual health crisis. And calling COVID-19 “fake news” as recently as March 9. So yes, when you think about who deserves the most blame for the United States surpassing Italy for the country with the highest number of coronavirus deaths, the answer is obviously Donald Trump. But let us not also forget to spread some of that blame around to his neck-pouched enabler, Mitch McConnell.

A new deep dive from The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer exploring McConnell’s political career—one in which he started out lacking any principles whatsoever or the desire to do anything beyond amass power—makes the extremely convincing argument that the Senate majority leader‘s decision to let Trump rule unchecked, in order to preserve his own standing, will be viewed one of the chief causes of thousands of American deaths.

Many have regarded McConnell’s support for Trump as a stroke of cynical political genius. McConnell has seemed to be both protecting his caucus and covering his flank in Kentucky—a deep-red state where, perhaps not coincidentally, Trump is far more popular than he is. When the pandemic took hold, the president’s standing initially rose in national polls, and McConnell and Trump will surely both take credit for the aid package in the coming months. Yet, as COVID-19 decimates the economy and kills Americans across the nation, McConnell’s alliance with Trump is looking riskier. Indeed, some critics argue that McConnell bears a singular responsibility for the country’s predicament. They say that he knew from the start that Trump was unequipped to lead in a crisis, but, because the President was beloved by the Republican base, McConnell protected him. He even went so far as to prohibit witnesses at the impeachment trial, thus guaranteeing that the president would remain in office. David Hawpe, the former editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, said of McConnell, “There are a lot of people disappointed in him. He could have mobilized the Senate. But the Republican Party changed underneath him, and he wanted to remain in power.”

While McConnell was initially unenthused by Trump‘s candidacy, he quickly got on board when he read the populist writing on the wall and realized he wanted to be on the “winning” team regardless of whether or not that meant the country would lose. As Mayer recounts, in the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign, “McConnell gave more assistance to Trump than many knew,” including effectively stonewalling the Obama administration’s attempts to alert Congress about the evidence that Russia was attempting to interfere with the election in order to help Trump. “I don’t know for sure why he did it,” former national security adviser Susan Rice told Mayer. “But my guess, particularly with the benefit of hindsight, is that he thought” calling out Russia “would be detrimental to Trump—so he delayed and deflected. It’s disgraceful.”

That, of course, was just the beginning of the unholy alliance between Trump and McConnell, the latter of whom has reportedly called the former “nuts” and likened him to Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court Justice whose bid for U.S. senate was derailed by allegations he had a thing for teenage girls—charges McConnell apparently saw no reason to bring up in public and which his spokesman denies (as does Moore). After spending nearly all of Barack Obama’s two terms in office trying to bury the Affordable Care Act in a shallow grave, McConnell saw Trump‘s presidency as a renewed opportunity to take away people’s health care and then some, including a little-noticed attempt to cut approximately $1 billion in annual funding from the Prevention and Public Health Fund at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which provides “grants to states for detecting and responding to infectious-disease outbreaks, among other things.” Thanks to John McCain, McConnell and his brethren were unsuccessful, but according to Jeff Levi, a professor of public health at George Washington University, one result of their efforts is that many of the people who lack insurance—of which there are a lot!—“will likely avoid getting tested and treated for COVID-19, because they fear the costs.”

While McConnell has unsurprisingly earned the ire of people like former Democratic Majority leader Harry Reid, who told Mayer “Mitch and the Republicans…stand mute no matter what Trump does. They have lost their souls,” a number of longtime conservatives have also turned against him, disgusted by the idea that there is literally nothing Trump can do that will get McConnell to flip, including, seemingly, presiding over the deaths of thousands of Americans.

John David Dyche, a lawyer in Louisville and until recently a conservative columnist, enjoyed unmatched access to McConnell and his papers, and published an admiring biography of him in 2009. In March, though, Dyche posted a Twitter thread that caused a lot of talk in the state’s political circles. He wrote that McConnell “of course realizes that Trump is a hideous human being & utterly unfit to be president,” and that, in standing by Trump anyway, he has shown that he has “no ideology except his own political power.” Dyche declined to comment for this article, but, after the coronavirus shut down most of America, he announced that he was contributing to McConnell’s opponent, Amy McGrath, and tweeted, “Those who stick with the hideous, incompetent demagogue endanger the country & will be remembered in history as shameful cowards.”

In an attempt to figure out what kind of person McConnell was before he became the spineless coconspirator whose bottomless desire for power helped create the unimaginable crisis we face today, Mayer spent months searching for “the larger principles or sense of purpose that animates” the senator, traveling twice to Kentucky, interviewing dozens of people, including those who love him and those who despise him, reading his speeches, autobiography, and what others have written about him. When she kept coming up empty, someone who knows McConnell well told her: “Give up. You can look and look for something more in him, but it isn’t there. I wish I could tell you that there is some secret thing that he really believes in, but he doesn’t.”

[Iliyah]

1. McTurtle is mad because he can't push thru . . .

unqualified partisan judges. McTurtle don't give a shit about COVID-19 nor the deadly effects it has on his fellow Americans.

[captain queeg]

2. I'll never forget. Also I won't forget Paul Ryan nt

[dalton99a]

3. McConnell and Trump are kindred spirits - absolute power at any cost.

[Mike Nelson]

4. I won't forget...

... how Mitch McConnell-Trump acted...

[samsingh]

5. that and so much more to blame on moscow mitch

[empedocles]

6. Good. You used the correct title an capitalization. Good form is important.

[Autumn]

7. One of those assholes is just about as bad as the other. The only thing they believe or cares

about is their own skin.

[crickets]

8. Oh, no one will forget, no matter how much he may wish it as days and years go by.

Moscow Mitch took too much smug credit when things were going his way for anyone to need reminding that he is a ruble-fueled partisan hack, all too eager to sell out the country for his own sick pleasure.

[FoxNewsSucks]

9. Not the only thing moscow mitch deserves blame for

He's a disgusting piece of human excrement