McConnell isn't playing a "long game," he's just stuffing his wallet.

You can make this Newsletter’s game a long one by subscribing!

You know what jumps out at you from the NY Times big story, “77 Days: Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election”?  It’s not Trump, it’s McConnell.  The story spends what appears to be five to six thousand words chronicling how Trump created and exploited the “Big Lie” about election fraud that culminated in the attack on the Capitol on January 6.  The story’s real accomplishment is pulling together the many threads of something we already know.  The whole thing was a manufactured piece of otherworldly nonsense that grew out of Trump’s abject fear of ending up as a loser.  That’s why he set the stage for challenging the 2016 election should he have lost by claiming it was “rigged” in the months before the election.  He did the same thing again in 2020, preparing his base with lies about voting fraud and mail-in voting long before November 3, when the whole thing came crashing down on his elaborately coiffed head.

The parts about McConnell aren’t anything we didn’t already know, either.  But the problem is that the Times buys McConnell’s waterlogged bullshit lock stock and empty barrel.  The man who has sold himself for decades as the canniest man in Washington, the wizard behind the curtain not only of the Senate but of D.C. politics in general, puts himself across in the story as – you guessed it! – yet another victim of that dastardly betrayer of noble souls, Donald Trump. 

But if you spent any time at all watching Mitch over the last four years, and you were open to being manipulated by a cheap carny barker, you bought into the lie that Mitch secretly hated Trump and was dismissive of him to his aides and political buddies, while on the surface holding his nose and going along with him so he could get his raft of conservative judges confirmed and stinking up benches around the country for the next few decades.  Stories about McConnell did him the favor of calling him “cynical,” as if playing along with a psychopathic killer like Trump was just another political arrow in Mitch’s quiver.

McConnell is about as cynical as our dog Ruby, and he’s about as victimized by Donald Trump as I am.  He’s a fat fucking water-boy for big business and a blathering drunk at the bar of white supremacy, and he always has been.  He’s been able to hide his true self within the folds of his many chins far too long, and the Times’ “77 Days” story lets him get away with it again.  Get this:  McConnell somehow leaked to the Times that he thought all along that Trump was just foolin’ around about overturning the election:

The senator was also under a false impression that the president was only blustering, the officials said. Mr. McConnell had had multiple conversations with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the senator’s top political adviser, Josh Holmes, had spoken with Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Both West Wing officials had conveyed the same message: They would pursue all potential avenues but recognized that they might come up short. Mr. Trump would eventually bow to reality and accept defeat.

So according to the canniest man in Washington, it’s all Kushner’s and Meadows’ fault.  They  duped Mitch into believing that Trump was just satisfying his base with all his threats and lies, and poor Mitch believed them.

“McConnell was playing a long game,” the Times reports, humoring Trump after the November election so he could be assured of his support for his two diamond-collared poodles in Georgia, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, in their run-off election on January 5.

That the New York Times bought into McConnell’s “long game” bullshit is all the evidence you need that we are so far down the rabbit hole of political delusion we’re likely never to see the light of day again.  The “long game” McConnell plays extends about as far as making sure his wallet is stuffed with cash and his face is stuffed with juicy steaks from The Palm.  Mitch isn’t a player in Washington.  He’s a feeder at a trough kept full by big corporations and fat-cat billionaires.  He’s so completely sold out, even his jowls are mortgaged to the likes of the Kochs, the Mercers, and the Adelsons.  The game he’s been playing isn’t cynical and it isn’t long -- it’s criminal.