GOP Needs To Get Rid Of McConnell, Not Trump

Kylee GriswoldAugust 12, 2022

Members of the armchair class who spend their days obsessing about their own self-important thoughts have spilled an awful lot of ink about the “future of the Republican Party” and what the GOP will look like in a post-Trump world — the way of the populist simpletons or the way of the norm-guarding establishment. The latest developments at Mar-a-Lago on Monday have some of these folks giddy at the prospect that the party could be purged of the former.

Yet in the wake of the nine-hour FBI raid on the home of the former president, two things have never been clearer: There’s nothing “post-Trump” about our current world, and if the Republican Party — and the republic itself — wants to have any future at all, it had better get more interested in fighting to win than in losing more slowly with meaningless PR maneuvers.

That’s where the GOP’s so-called leaders come in, with none of them illustrating the ideological fork in the road quite as starkly as Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader from Kentucky who has established his establishment self as a stalwart against the Donald Trump wing of his party. And whether McConnell can bring himself to admit it (he can’t), that wing of the party is the party.

In response to the raid at Mar-a-Lago, the search warrant for which was signed by a Jeffrey Epstein associate, the Senate’s Republican leader failed to respond for a full day. In fact, he even rebuffed reporters’ questions about it at a press conference in his home state. Only after 23 hours had passed did McConnell get around to issuing a neutered, two-sentence statement:

“The country deserves a thorough and immediate explanation of what led to the events of Monday. Attorney General Garland and the Department of Justice should already have provided answers to the American people and must do so immediately.”

Oh, must they? Or what? If there’s anything McConnell can do about the deep state’s malfeasance — which has been thoroughly documented well before Monday’s targeting of the opposition party, one reason why we don’t need to wait for the search warrant to conclude at least some measure of foul play — he won’t. And the DOJ and FBI know it.

Meanwhile, the Biden Justice Department is ordering hits on the administration’s most influential political opponent by raiding the home of the former president, potential future nominee, and de facto party leader. And the reason is obvious.

Trump is a threat. He’s onto the FBI and the DOJ and is unafraid to expose the depths of their corruption, especially after they weaponized the full force of the intelligence community to concoct a false pretext for spying on his campaign, aided and abetted a years-long hoax, smeared his law-abiding supporters as domestic terrorists and intimidated them with threats of retaliation, and helped install a disgraced crackhead’s father in the Oval Office by suppressing evidence of family corruption with false labels of “disinformation” right before the election.

It’s what his critics loathe about him, but it’s what makes Trump such an effective leader: If the fight is in the mud, that’s where Trump will be with dirty hands — decorum and establishment be damned.

Meanwhile, McConnell is here a day late to offer a statement.

But that’s not all. McConnell has made a number of other contributions as he seeks to chart the future of the party. He’s endorsed boring and unelectable candidates that would do nothing to advance conservative causes. He consistently screws over taxpayers by caving on exorbitantly expensive legislation stuffed with pork and Democrat wish-list items. He’s helped Democrats send tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine — something he’s proud of — with no clear foreign policy objective but plenty of insults calling his detractors fringe isolationists. He endorsed Democrats’ anti-gun bill that would gut rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment. And he pretends conservatives are the aggressors in the culture war waged by the radical left.

As my colleague Christopher Bedford wrote last February, McConnell — like the rest of the D.C. swamp and its viciously anti-Trump bureaucrats at the DOJ — desperately wants to “go back to the way things were”:

“He wants a return to promising to tackle illegal immigration before winking at corporate America that nothing will change. He wants to raise money on fighting the abortion of our infants while comfortably lifting nary a finger. He wants to shrug and change the subject when asked about men dominating women’s sports and using women’s bathrooms. He wants fewer taxes and more wars.”

But in a world where the left wants to let boys dominate girls on their sports teams, advocates for taxpayer-funded abortion for any reason until the moment of birth, pushes for state-sanctioned racist curricula in government schools, oscillates between demanding police be defunded and law-abiding citizens be disarmed, insists riots are mostly peaceful when their allies initiate them, hosts banana-republic style show trials against political opponents, insists concerns about election security amount to insurrection, and supports a vaccinate-or-be-fired approach to health, there’s no going back to the way things were.

And no world where a demonstrably corrupt law enforcement bureau can attack the former president and current opposition party leader can be considered post-Trump. He’s very much still with us, and now he’s back in the mud.

The future of the party can only have one leader, and we’d best not dispense with our best fighter. McConnell’s got to go.

Kylee Griswold is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.