“Good morning, everyone,” he said with a slight smile on his owlish mien. “It is certainly a happy day for the GOP.”

He congratulated President-elect Donald Trump and commended the 45th and soon-to-be 47th commander in chief’s winning campaign over Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump’s campaign, McConnell said, ran a “sharper operation this time” than even its winning 2016 effort and losing 2020 reelection bid. McConnell then moved to a matter dear to his heart: the Senate. His super PAC spent $425 million and won back a majority for Republicans. They flipped three seats in Ohio, Montana, and West Virginia (Pennsylvania is likely to go red, too), making for a 53-47 majority over Democrats in the 119th Congress.

It was classic McConnell — three minutes of punctilious remarks delivered in a matter-of-fact tone that conveyed a few big points to the media in no uncertain terms.

During the subsequent question and answer period, he returned to a perennial pastime — tweaking the Democrats. Trump won because “people were just not happy with this administration,” McConnell said of retiring President Joe Biden and Harris, the late-in-the-game replacement of the incumbent as Democratic nominee. The GOP majority would ensure that the legislative filibuster endures and that Democrats could not pack the Supreme Court or the Senate by adding Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia as states.

The moment was also bittersweet. McConnell is the longest-tenured Kentucky senator, having first won his seat in 1984. He is also the longest-tenured Senate party leader, having served since January 2007. It’s a tenure that includes eight years as minority leader, six years in the majority during the final two years of former President Barack Obama’s administration and the entire first Trump presidency, and then four more years with his party out of power in the chamber during the Biden administration.

McConnell loves leading his party, but this victory was not for him — it was for the next GOP Senate majority leader. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) was elected to the leadership post by his Republican colleagues in a Nov. 13 secret ballot. Earlier this year, the 82-year-old McConnell revealed he would not stand for reelection by his colleagues in an uncharacteristically emotional speech from the well of the Senate. This postelection presser was his last one.

McConnell’s rise to the pinnacle of power is a remarkable story. Nothing came easy, according to Michael Tackett, author of the new book The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party (Simon & Schuster, 2024).

McConnell, whose full name is Addison Mitchell McConnell III, was born on Feb. 20, 1942, in Sheffield, Alabama. His father worked at the McConnell Funeral Home in Athens, and his mother stayed at home to care for him. Young McConnell was stricken with polio at 2 years old. It was a tough, lonely time for the lad. Money was tight. His father was overseas in the war, and McConnell spent months confined to bed. His mother would haul him from his little room for physical therapy sessions. One of his legs atrophied, and she worried he might die. Tackett suspects suffering polio sparked McConnell to overachieve. It’s not uncommon among those who survived the disease.

Whatever the wellspring, McConnell showed his lust for politics and leadership at an early age. He sought the role of the king in a school pageant when he was in first grade. By age 10, he was sporting an “I like Ike” button. McConnell’s family left Alabama when he was 14 years old after his father landed a better job in Louisville, Kentucky. Despite being the new child at the high school, he became the class’s vice president. Then, he set his sights on being president of the school student council. Through coalition-building and relentless campaigning, McConnell beat a more popular classmate. At the University of Louisville, he won campus elections and told a girlfriend he wanted to be a senator one day.

McConnell’s first taste of Capitol politics came with a college internship in the office of former Rep. Gene Snyder, one of the few Kentucky Republicans in Congress. He traded up to a spot in Sen. John Sherman Cooper’s office, a centrist Republican who was elected in 1960, and then joined the staff of freshman Sen. Marlow Cook (R-KY) in 1968. McConnell developed expertise on Senate consideration of judicial nominations when he had to help his boss contend with former President Richard M. Nixon’s Supreme Court nominations of Clement Haynesworth and G. Harrold Carswell, both of which tanked. McConnell saw the difference a justice could make when Harry Blackmun made it onto the court and soon thereafter, in 1973, wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade.

McConnell enjoyed being a staffer, but it was not enough. He plotted a long course to become a senator. He returned to Kentucky and won election to county office in 1977, where he suffered the slings of the majority Democrats and crafted ways to work with them and build a springboard to the Senate. He got scant support from the national Republican Party’s leaders, who gave him little chance to win a seat in a traditionally Democratic state. After seven years of disciplined toil and cold-blooded and brilliant maneuvering, McConnell squeaked out a victory and, in January 1985, was sworn into the Senate as a junior senator.

McConnell quickly showed himself to be both an utter partisan who would do anything for the GOP and a bipartisan deal-maker with many centrist positions. One of his early votes, for example, was to join Democrats in supporting sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid regime, which passed over former President Ronald Reagan’s veto. McConnell learned that real power in the Senate could be had by mastering its legislative procedures. He hard-bargained with presidents and colleagues alike by holding up legislation and nominations. McConnell developed into a tremendous fundraiser and used the money to build a network of support within his party and to recruit new members. Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Todd Young (R-IN), to cite only two examples, were lured to the Senate by McConnell in recent years from their safe House seats.

While his rise to become leader of the GOP conference took 22 years, it looks almost inevitable in retrospect. Not only did he love his work, but McConnell developed the exact skills needed to get things done in a notoriously balky legislative body. He is patient, listens more than he speaks, and has a steely reserve and calculating mind that takes a long view. Additionally, one Democrat told Tackett that McConnell “has a preternatural sense of when an issue has arrived, and [he] capitalizes on that. He also doesn’t care what anybody thinks about him.”

Thus, if McConnell could use the filibuster to stop campaign finance legislation, he did it, even if it enraged other senators. If he thought he could rein in an activist judiciary by stymying Obama’s nominations and then ramming Trump’s picks, he did it. If growing the ranks of GOP legislators could best be done by creating his own super PAC to fund good candidates, McConnell was all in.

For all his winning, McConnell has struggled with the rise of populism in his party, which offends his pragmatic Reaganism. He never liked Trump, whom he saw as a reckless and feckless “sleazeball” who backed bad candidates that cost the party legislative seats. When Trump derided him as an “old crow,” McConnell laughed it off and handed out special edition bottles of Old Crow Bourbon (made in Kentucky, of course) to senators and favorite donors.

Trump and populist senators, such as Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO), were complicit in the worst day in McConnell’s career — Jan. 6, 2021. The invasion of the Capitol appalled McConnell, and the subsequent impeachment put him in a terrible dilemma. He could be a good team player and defend his party’s leader, or he could whip his troops to help the Democrats ensure Trump never held office again. He did not wish to drive Trump’s millions of fervid supporters from the party, so he condemned Trump, voted to acquit him, and hoped Trump would fade away.

McConnell’s term runs through January 2027. He told last week’s press gaggle he would spend it fighting for a strong national defense and a robust American role in the world to counter the machinations of Russia and other malevolent regimes. It was an implicit rebuke to the incoming president and the anti-interventionist wing of his party.

It might only be the first shot across the bow. Unencumbered from the duties of party leadership and in the twilight of his magnificent career, McConnell is free to do what he thinks is right.

Kevin R. Kosar (@kevinrkosar) is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and edits UnderstandingCongress.org.