With McConnell Retiring, the Old GOP Is Gone for Good | Opinion

"To the disappointment of my critics, I'm still here on the job," said former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor on Thursday, his 83rd birthday. He will not be on the job for long. The senior senator from Kentucky announced he will not stand for reelection in 2026 to what would have been his eighth term in the upper chamber. Last February, McConnell announced that he would leave his leadership post after the 2024 presidential election, leading to widespread speculation, fed by visibly worsening health problems, that he would serve out his current term and then leave the scene altogether. With him goes one of the last remnants of the old Republican Party.

If McConnell had stayed, he would almost certainly have won reelection in a state where he has dominated Republican politics for decades, allowing him to continue in office into his nineties. If that had happened, he would have continued as an anachronistic anomaly—one of the very few remaining GOP legislators who has not embraced the national populist movement that led not only to a second term for President Donald J. Trump but also to a dramatic reshaping of the Republican Party. Once a powerful force in the GOP, Trump's Republican critics now number in the single digits across both chambers of Congress.

McConnell's relationship with the Republican Party, and with Trump, now its undisputed leader, has gotten complicated. Once a master of the GOP's confident Reaganite establishment, McConnell frequently crossed swords with the current president over policy, procedure, ideology, and personality. According to a biography of McConnell released just before the November election, the departing senator regards Trump as a "sleazeball" and has believed—mistakenly, as election results suggest—that being criticized by Trump can only help his reputation.

In recent weeks, McConnell has been one of just three Republican senators—the others being Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)—to cast votes against Trump cabinet nominees he found objectionable—namely Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—all of whom were confirmed by the GOP's solidly Trumpian majority.

Nevertheless, McConnell is, and for a short time will remain, a politician. Personal animosity notwithstanding, he has chosen his battles with Trump carefully and, just as in his interactions with Democratic opponents, he has never been afraid to waffle, dissimulate, and even lose if doing so would ensure his faction's continued relevance in the GOP. After January 6, 2021, he both blamed Trump for inciting the demonstration at the U.S. Capitol and voted to acquit him in his second impeachment trial. His distribution of Senate campaign funds, particularly in the 2022 midterms, in which Republican results were underwhelming, left the impression that loyalty to him over Trump was his paramount consideration, even above winning or losing the Senate majority. McConnell's plodding style contrasts with Trump's bravado, but the former Senate Republican leader set aside intraparty slings and arrows long enough to transform the federal judiciary and ease Trump's three Supreme Court nominees' paths to confirmation.

McConnell's work to approve conservative judges may well be his greatest legacy among Republicans—even his harshest critics acknowledge their importance. But his detractors still have nothing good to say about his efforts to pass mammoth spending bills that Trump opposed, concede cultural issues to the radical Left, and use Senate procedures to slow down or sabotage conservative initiatives McConnell disagreed with.

True to form, however, McConnell has long rejected the notion that he belongs to, much less leads, an intraparty resistance to Trump. "I expect to support most of what this administration is trying to accomplish," he said in an interview on 60 Minutes earlier this month. Nor, like almost every other politician in the nearly extinct Reaganite generation, did he do much to mentor protégés, cultivate disciples, or groom successors. While this does not go far enough for Trump, who recently called McConnell "a very bitter guy" after his vote against Kennedy, it has also frustrated the dwindling community of anti-Trump Republicans, who still have an oversized voice in the media and think-tank world but virtually no presence in elected office. After more than 40 years in the Senate, he leaves, as freshman Indiana Senator Jim Banks told the New York Times, "a nonfactor."

Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.