Mitch McConnell makes a play to push Trump out of Trump’s GOP

A week ago the Senate voted 57-43 to convict Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial. The House managers made a persuasive case, and the vote -- while falling ten votes short of the two-thirds required for conviction -- constituted a damning, historic rebuke of the former president.

Seven Republicans joined all fifty Democrats in an effort to hold Trump accountable. Then, immediately after that vote, Mitch McConnell denounced Trump's big lie and incitement of a violent insurrection. It was remarkable, and not just because it followed McConnell's vote to acquit or his lame excuse for casting that vote. McConnell spoke truthfully about Trump's sedition, and thus affirmed the House managers' case against Trump.

January 6th was a disgrace.

American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like.

Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the Vice President.

They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth — because he was angry he'd lost an election.

Former President Trump's actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty.

The House accused the former President of, quote, 'incitement.' That is a specific term from the criminal law.

Let me put that to the side for one moment and reiterate something I said weeks ago: There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.

The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their President.

And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated President kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.

The issue is not only the President's intemperate language on January 6th.

It is not just his endorsement of remarks in which an associate urged 'trial by combat.'

It was also the entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe; the increasingly wild myths about a reverse landslide election that was being stolen in some secret coup by our now-President.

Of course McConnell was trying to have it both ways with his statement. Huddle with the majority of Republican Senators in refusing to convict Trump, while attempting to diminish Trump's domination of the GOP going forward. It is an awkward maneuver, unsurprisingly, since McConnell is trying to push Trump out of what is still Trump's GOP without alienating Trump-Republicans.

The senior senator from Kentucky, always focused on the next election cycle, doesn't act out of principle. McConnell watched the GOP lose the House, the Senate (with two races in Georgia while Trump refused to let go of the big lie), and the White House under Trump. Motivated by cold, hard political calculation, McConnell is trying to wrest leadership of the party from Trump, because he is convinced that is the most reliable path to reclaiming a Republican majority in the Senate.

"He has," in George Will's words, "his eyes on the prize: 2022, perhaps the most crucial nonpresidential election year in U.S. history. It might determine whether the Republican Party can be a plausible participant in the healthy oscillations of a temperate two-party system."

McConnell is savvier than Trump, and more capable of acting strategically, but he may well lose to the Florida strongman. Other Senate Republicans are pushing back against McConnell's gambit.

Ron Johnson, in a media blitz from Fox to conservative talk radio, has been at the head of the pack among Trump defenders. At least his outlandishness is consistent. Not so with Lindsey Graham ("Count me out. Enough is enough"), though he has returned to Trump's fold in the safe confines of Fox News (from Chris Wallace to Sean Hannity) and plans a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago soon.

And then there are Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Rick Scott, John Kennedy, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Cynthia Lummis, Roger Marshall, and Tommy Tuberville – all of whom cast votes to support at least one objection to confirming Biden’s Electoral College victory. They would appear to be in Trump's camp.

George Will, who left the Republican Party in June 2016, and almost certainly hopes to rejoin a post-Trump Republican Party, observes:

I do not think anyone should feel confident about the outcome of this ... But there's no one, I think, more long-headed, more meticulous in planning and more steeped in the realities of electoral politics on the Republican side than Mitch McConnell. If I had to bet, I would bet that Mitch McConnell more than holds his own against a man who is a dilettante in the ring against a professional politician.

The outcome of this factional battle, which may play out over multiple election cycles, will be highly consequential for the party and the country. But purging Trump will hardly ensure ridding the Republican Party of authoritarian patterns and practices. The GOP, post-Gingrich, has become increasingly anti-democratic, more than willing to trash governing norms that serve as the guardrails of democracy, and as we have seen, prepared even to countenance violence.

The Democratic Party is the small-d democratic alternative. Looking forward to 2022, 2024, and beyond, the most consequential battles will be Democratic vs. Republican.