Mitch McConnell spent nearly two decades as Senate Republican leader biting his tongue. Now 84 and heading for the exit, the Kentucky senator has stopped biting.
His sharpest salvo came last week. The Justice Department floated an "anti-weaponization" fund that could compensate people pardoned after storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. McConnell's response was blunt, as the Washington Examiner reported:
"So the nation's top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong, take your pick."
That line landed like a brick in a party still calibrating how close to stand to the president. But McConnell is no longer calibrating. He has voted against three Trump Cabinet nominees, repeatedly joined a handful of Senate Republicans opposing the president's tariffs, and helped sink the SAVE America Act, a Trump-backed election bill McConnell says amounts to a federal takeover of elections.
McConnell announced his departure from leadership in early 2024, before Trump won a second term. A year later he confirmed he would not seek reelection after four decades representing Kentucky. Rep. Andy Barr, a Republican who once interned for McConnell but earned Trump's endorsement, is slated to replace him next year.
Free from the burden of holding his caucus together, and free from any future ballot, McConnell told colleagues and the press he felt "liberated." He told CBS News he expected to support most of what the administration tries to accomplish, adding:
"So, what happened in the past is irrelevant to me."
The past, though, keeps intruding on the present. McConnell is a self-described Reaganite and an institutionalist. His remaining time in the Senate has become a running argument with the populist direction Trump has set for the party, particularly on foreign policy, trade, and executive overreach.
As the top appropriator for the Pentagon budget, McConnell has challenged the administration on peace talks with Ukraine, hostility toward NATO, and what he calls "illegal" tariffs. After one tariff vote, he retorted that "no cross-eyed reading of Reagan" could undo the economic harm of trade wars.
Last month he penned a Washington Post op-ed demanding to know why Elbridge Colby, one of Trump's defense undersecretaries, was "stonewalling" Congress on $400 million in delayed assistance to Ukraine.
McConnell is not the only retiring Republican willing to speak up. The Wall Street Journal dubbed the group the "YOLO caucus", senators no longer worried about what a critical remark might do to their careers or their relationship with the president. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina has been even more vocal, drawing weekly fire from the White House. Trump accused Tillis last week of "screwing" the Republican Party with his criticism.
But the consequences for dissent have been real. Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana were both ousted this month by Trump-backed challengers. Cornyn's defeat was especially striking: a senior Republican who had served in leadership, replaced after Trump threw his weight behind Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate primary.
That dynamic, loyalty rewarded, independence punished, is exactly what makes McConnell's position unusual. He cannot be primaried. He cannot be stripped of a leadership title he already surrendered. The only leverage left is the vote itself, and McConnell has used it.
The frustration inside the GOP conference over Trump's willingness to target sitting senators has been palpable. McConnell, by virtue of retirement, sits outside that pressure system entirely.
For all his newfound candor, McConnell has been deliberate about where and how he picks his fights. He avoids hallway interviews and prefers to deliver statements through op-eds and occasional Senate floor speeches. He rarely names the president directly, choosing instead to target advisers and policy specifics, a tactic Tillis also employs.
He has also offered stray compliments. During a brief encounter at the White House, McConnell praised Trump's decision to strike Iran's nuclear facilities, a prelude to the conflict that began in February. He attended the president's inauguration with his wife, Elaine Chao, despite Trump's history of racially tinged attacks against her.
That gesture of reconciliation was notable. So was the fact that it did not last.
When McConnell voted against Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over Kennedy's vaccine skepticism, McConnell is a childhood polio survivor, Trump called him "bitter" and trashed his tenure as GOP leader on camera. On tariffs, Trump posted on Truth Social that McConnell and other Republican "no" votes suffered from "Trump derangement syndrome" and had been "extremely difficult to deal with" for Senate leadership.
More recently, Trump claimed one of McConnell's aides embarrassed him at a committee hearing and should be fired, then slipped in a dig at McConnell for "stupidly" opposing efforts to eliminate the filibuster.
The two men once had a transactional partnership that produced results. McConnell helped cement a conservative majority on the Supreme Court and advanced other Republican priorities during Trump's first term. In return, he largely held back his criticism, only occasionally reproaching the president's more incendiary remarks.
His most forceful public comments after the 2021 Capitol riot came once Trump was already on his way out of office. That timing was not lost on critics then, and it colors how some view his current outspokenness now.
But the political math has changed. McConnell no longer has to manage a caucus, protect a majority, or worry about the next election cycle. He is free to vote his convictions on tariffs, foreign aid, and executive overreach, and he has done so repeatedly. The ongoing legislative battles in the Senate over reconciliation and spending priorities only sharpen the contrast between McConnell's old-guard conservatism and the populist energy driving the party.
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader John Thune is navigating his own rough patch with the White House, caught between a president who demands loyalty and a conference where Republican senators have shown a willingness to break ranks on major legislation.
McConnell's approach is narrow by design. He has focused on the issues where he believes the ideological contrast is sharpest, NATO, Ukraine, tariffs, the filibuster, and left the rest alone. He is not running a shadow opposition. He is running a seminar on what he thinks conservatism ought to mean, delivered from the Senate floor to a party that has largely moved past him.
Whether that seminar changes any minds is an open question. McConnell commands respect among Senate institutionalists but holds no formal power. His votes matter only on the margins, and his op-eds reach an audience that already agrees with him.
What he does have is something most politicians never get: the final word, delivered without consequence. Four decades in the Senate bought him that much.
A man with nothing left to lose and a vote that still counts is a rare thing in Washington. McConnell seems intent on spending both before the clock runs out.