According to an explosive new report from award-winning journalist Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) considers President Donald Trump to be “nuts” and has compared him to failed Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused of preying on underage girls.

So why does McConnell agree to assist such an utterly immoral man? According to Mayer, because the Kentucky Republican is pursing a larger agenda and sees Trump as a means to an end:

“McConnell has stayed largely silent about the President’s lies and inflammatory public remarks, and has propped up the Administration with legislative and judicial victories. McConnell has also brought along the Party’s financial backers.”

Packing the courts with right-wing judicial ideologues and raising tons of money. That’s all McConnell cares about.

But in private, McConnell is less protective of Trump, slamming him for being a poor leader and morally bankrupt:

“Although the two men almost always support each other in public, several members of McConnell’s innermost circle told me that in private things are quite different. They say that behind Trump’s back McConnell has called the President ‘nuts,’ and made clear that he considers himself smarter than Trump, and that he ‘can’t stand him. (A spokesman for McConnell, who declined to be interviewed, denies this.) According to one such acquaintance, McConnell said that Trump resembles a politician he loathes: Roy Moore, the demagogic former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, whose 2017 campaign for an open U.S. Senate seat was upended by allegations that he’d preyed on teen-age girls. (Moore denies them.) ‘They’re so much alike,’ McConnell told the acquaintance.”

In other words, McConnell is only interested in power, and his power is greatly magnified by his alliance with a man as odious as Trump, even if the president just so happens to be “nuts”:

“John David Dyche, a lawyer in Louisville and until recently a conservative columnist … posted a Twitter thread that caused a lot of talk in the state’s political circles. He wrote that McConnell ‘of course realizes that Trump is a hideous human being & utterly unfit to be president,’ and that, in standing by Trump anyway, he has shown that he has ‘no ideology except his own political power.'”

COVID-19 may have changed everything. Trump’s mishandling of the crisis is already abundantly clear, and it could wind up costing Republicans control of the Senate and White House when all the votes are counted this November, Mayer’s report concludes:

“As the consequences of the Trump Presidency become lethally clear, his deal looks costlier every day. The trusted Cook Political Report recently downgraded the chances that Republicans would hold their Senate majority to a fifty-fifty tossup, after conservative strategists reported widespread alarm over Trump’s handling of the pandemic.”

When karma finally arrives, both McConnell and Trump may find themselves without a job and utterly devoid of the power they both so desperately crave.

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