Mitch McConnell’s Senate Reign Ends With a Whimper

Senator Mitch McConnell stood on the Senate floor last week on his 83rd birthday to announce that he would not seek an eighth term as Kentucky’s senior senator in 2026. “My current term in the Senate will be my last,” he muttered in his signature gravelly drawl. The response was tepid. So much so that North Carolina Republican senator Thom Tillis had to request unanimous consent for a 30-second round of applause. About 20 senators, six pages, and a smattering of floor staff slowly rose to their feet to clap, breaking a few seconds early to move onto other matters.

It was a subdued send-off, symbolizing an unlikely fate for the most influential Senate Republican leader of the last half-century, a man who built the modern GOP in his own image—only to find himself abandoned by it in old age. Indeed, the party he so ruthlessly shaped over his four-decade senatorial career has been hijacked by Donald Trump, a man he reportedly personally detests but whose political rise he enabled. Now, as Trump’s grip on the Republican Party tightens, McConnell is taking his final bow as a relic of a political era—one of quiet plotting and backroom dealmaking—that no longer exists.

“‘Mitch McConnellism’ as a political philosophy is dead,” Matt Jones, a Louisville sportscaster who considered a Senate run against McConnell in 2020, told me.

To be sure, McConnell’s swan song hasn’t been without bite: In a December essay, the outgoing senator openly criticized the right’s isolationist rhetoric on foreign policy, and lamented that Trump has “courted Putin” and “treated [NATO] allies and alliance commitments erratically and sometimes with hostility.” More recently, he was one of three Senate Republicans to vote against the confirmation of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—a move that Senator Jack Reed told me he personally found “courageous.” McConnell was also the only senator to vote against confirming Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Health and Human Service Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Needless to say, it was a strange sight to see McConnell, once the Senate GOP’s ideological lodestar, become the lone holdout in a conference of his own making. Still, “he loves the Senate,” Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, told me during a hallway interview Tuesday, “and he’s very concerned that we keep the Senate as our founders intended it to be.”

To Trump’s presumptive delight, McConnell did join the GOP fold in voting to confirm Kash Patel for a 10-year term as FBI Director. “I hope and expect he will move quickly to reset the Bureau with greater transparency, accountability, and cooperation with Congress,” the senator said in a statement after the vote.

On Wednesday, I asked McConnell to elaborate further on that position. “I think I’m going to continue my habit of not doing press between the Capitol and here,” he laughed. “Good try!”

I expected just as much; McConnell famously avoids hallway interviews with the Capitol press, walking blankly through our questions, offering nothing that can be used in a news story. “He used to have selective hearing,” Senator John Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican, said of McConnell. “Now his hearing now is just not that good because he’s old. But it used to be fine, it was just selective…. You guys, as reporters, might have noticed that.”

For decades, McConnell was the undisputed architect of Republican power in Washington. He turned obstructionism into an art form, blocking Democratic priorities with cold efficiency. In 2016, he famously refused to grant a hearing to President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, arguing that the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat should be filled by the next president because it was an election year. Four years later, McConnell did the exact opposite, ramming through Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation mere weeks before the 2020 election. It was a duplicitous maneuver with major consequences, securing him a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court, whose makeup likely would have been the inverse if McConnell had abided by Senate precedent.

But the scheme was also peak McConnell, whose influence was never about fiery speeches or ideological grandstanding. Rather, he employed private cunning and an economy of words, rarely speaking unless it served his political ends. “To Mitch McConnell, communication means giving things away. If he tells people what he is up to, they may be able to use that against him,” said New York Times reporter Carl Hulse at the beginning of Trump’s first term in 2016.

McConnell himself once acknowledged this strategy. “I was hoping some reporter would ask me a question about anything,” he once joked to Hulse, recalling his early days in the Senate. “Now I spend most of my time smiling sweetly at you guys and walking on by.”

That discipline served him well for some time during the Trump era. But McConnell’s relevance was clearly fading by the 2020 election, the violent aftermath of which offered him one of few opportunities to rid the party of Trump for good. In the end, the then Senate majority leader voted against convicting Trump of inciting an insurrection. Meanwhile, his refusal to engage in the performative outrage that defines Trump-era politics became a liability in a party increasingly driven by personality cults and grievance politics. Trump eventually dubbed him “Old Crow,” a moniker McConnell wryly embraced and one that bemused his colleagues. “It was right after he was called ‘Old Crow’ and I think I got like an Old Crow bourbon as a gift from Mitch,” Republican senator Lisa Murkowski recounted to me. Still, the insult underscored the president’s growing stranglehold on the GOP as the party slowly slipped through the senator’s fingers.

McConnell’s body has been failing him lately—he’s suffered multiple falls, at times requiring a wheelchair. Last August, he froze at the podium during the weekly GOP leadership press conference, prompting John Barrasso to assist his exit. After he reemerged for questions, I asked the then ghostly pale senator whether he had a replacement in mind. McConnell laughed out loud, refused to take any more questions, and walked away with his then heir apparent John Thune, now the new majority leader.

But more than his health, it’s McConnell’s political standing that has deteriorated beyond repair. It now belongs to Trump, whose loyalists have taken over the Republican Senate conference and who delights in humiliating the senator whenever possible. Once the most feared man in Washington, McConnell has become an afterthought, unable to stop Trump-aligned candidates from winning primaries and reshaping the GOP in their leader’s image.

When McConnell takes his official exit, a power vacuum will emerge. Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron, a McConnell protégé turned Trump loyalist, is already eyeing his seat. What’s left for McConnell in the meantime? A slow farewell tour, another potential slate of contrarian—but inconsequential—votes, maybe a few more sound bites, and a quiet retreat into irrelevance. McConnell, the turtle who outlasted them all, is finally crawling away.