If former President Donald Trump succeeds in returning to the White House in January 2025, he will find stout roadblocks awaiting him in Washington, DC. Among the most significant: his own fellow Republicans in the US Senate, led in spirit if not title by outgoing GOP upper chamber leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
McConnell on April 1 sought to remind whoever needed hearing it that he isn’t going anywhere. His current Senate term doesn’t end until January 2027. His words in an interview with Louisville radio station WHAS were unmistakably aimed at a resurgent America First movement that has catapulted Trump into mathematically locking up a third straight Republican presidential nomination.
‘Actually Fighting Back’
“I’m particularly involved in actually fighting back against the isolationist movement in my own party. And some in the other as well. And the symbol of that lately is: Are we going to help Ukraine or not?” McConnell told the station. “I’ve got this sort of on my mind for the next couple years as something I’m going to focus on.”
McConnell tepidly endorsed Trump once he wrapped up his primary dominance in March, choosing not to openly oppose his party’s nominee. But that isn’t stopping him from continuing to go negative. “[President Joe] Biden’s got problems too. Both these candidates don’t score very well with the public,” McConnell asserted in the radio interview. “One of them’s going to win. What am I going to do? I’m going to concentrate on trying to turn my job over to the next majority leader.”
There’s a lot to dissect in that statement. Let’s start with the fact that McConnell is calling Trump unpopular just as a new poll once again shows his own standing within the GOP grassroots to be decidedly underwater.
A recent Morning Consult survey shows former President Trump polling a whopping 43 points higher than Sen. McConnell. In the poll, conducted March 30-31 – which is just a day or two before McConnell’s radio slam – Trump’s favorability with surveyed GOP voters came in at 76%. McConnell was at 33%.
Trump’s unfavorability rating was 17%; McConnell’s was 44%.
But such polls are nothing new. The more critical part of McConnell’s quote was his reference to feverishly working to secure his own kind of Republican as his upper chamber leadership successor. Mitch McConnell may not be liked by the red base, but he has plenty of allies on his side of the Senate aisle.
Mitch’s Man Takes Heat in Texas
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) is one McConnell intimate who has already announced he is seeking the post. Like his high-placed friend, Cornyn is a mover and shaker inside GOP Senate circles who is finding himself increasingly loathed by Republicans far removed from those cozy confines.
“Powerful and deep-pocketed forces in Texas plan to challenge Cornyn’s 2026 re-election bid, claiming he represents a return to establishment politics,” The Daily Caller reported April 4.
And they are not shy about saying so.
“John Cornyn is a total failure. Texas will not re-elect him to the US Senate, and his colleagues would be fools to trust him,” Texas GOP state Rep. Tony Tinderholt told the news site. “Republican voters deserve leaders who will fight for them and put America first. John Cornyn is nothing more than a swampy sellout.”
“For years, I have been looking for any evidence whatsoever that John Cornyn is actually a Republican. So far, I have been greatly disappointed, over and over again, as have all grassroots conservatives and the Republican Party of Texas,” conservative news site BizPac’s founder Joseph Trahan, who is a Republican nominee for a state Senate seat in 2024, exclaimed. “He continually sides with the Democrats and defines the Uniparty with his policies. The last thing the United States needs right now is a Democrat or RINO in leadership of the US Senate.”
Meanwhile, Trump on April 1 publicly pilloried another McConnell chum.
“One of the worst senators in the United States Senate is, without question, [Sen.] Bill Cassidy [R-LA], a total flake, Republican though he may be,” Trump wrote in a blistering Truth Social post. “He campaigned in the great state of Louisiana on Trump, Trump, Trump, and was absolutely thrilled when he was able to get my very important endorsement.”
“Nevertheless, when the Democrats’ impeachment hoax started, this lamebrain senator actually voted against me,” Trump continued.
Cassidy has echoed Democrat talking points on Jan. 6, further angering Trump. “This is not someone you want to be in a foxhole with – very disloyal and not very smart,” Trump stated.
McConnell ‘Quality Candidates’
With conflict between his MAGA agenda and Senate Republicans determined to oppose him all but assured should he win the November election, what does Trump do with McConnell’s handpicked Senate candidates running this year?
McConnell famously vowed after the 2022 midterm elections that the DC Republican establishment would “control the primary outcome” for party Senate races in 2024. Latching onto the big-box media narrative that Trump-aligned hopefuls are by default not “quality candidates,” McConnell promised to produce acceptable (in his view) choices in the next major election cycle.
How has that worked out?
McConnell has cleared a path for GOP nomination for not one but two former top executives of Bridgewater Associates, a private equity behemoth so deeply invested in China that it manages state money for the Asian communist superpower.
In New Mexico, ex-Bridgewater chief financial officer Nella Domenici, daughter of longtime GOP Sen. Pete Domenici, is expected to claim the party’s Senate nod. In addition to her corporate career at what is undoubtedly the most active US-based hedge fund doing business in China today, Domenici also served on the board of directors for Change Healthcare, an organization that sought to create vaccine passports for Americans during the coronavirus pandemic.
In Pennsylvania, former Bridgewater CEO David McCormick is poised to win the Republican Senate nomination. McCormick fell just short of the nod in 2022, losing out to TV doctor Mehmet Oz. McConnell urged him to try again in 2024.
McCormick is married to Dina Powell McCormick, a major establishment Republican force in her own right. Incredibly, Powell McCormick currently serves as board chair of a New York City-based organization, the Robin Hood Foundation, that works to bring migrants into the completely overwhelmed Big Apple – all while her husband denounces the Biden administration on the campaign trail for being soft on the immigration crisis.
Imagine the reaction these two newly minted Republican senators would have to Trump tariff proposals against China should they win their respective races.
It's an interesting problem. Does Donald Trump endorse McConnell-backed Republican Senate candidates in an effort to help his party retake the chamber, even though it is inevitable that they will go on to help his avowed Kentuckian foe assiduously work against him and his policies should he retake the White House?
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