Flashback: How Mitch McConnell Helped Pave the Way for Donald Trump’s Rise
March 6, 2024, update: One week after announcing that he would step down from his Senate leadership role at the end of this year, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) endorsed Donald Trump, saying Trump “will have my support” as the 2024 Republican presidential nominee.
In 2023, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell became the longest-serving U.S. Senate party leader in history.
The powerful Republican’s lengthy political career, the choices and tradeoffs he’s made along the way, and his role in former President Donald Trump’s rise are the subject of McConnell, the GOP & the Court, a new FRONTLINE documentary from veteran FRONTLINE filmmaker Michael Kirk and his team that aired in October 2023 and is now available to watch in full online.
Amid a Republican leadership shakeup in the House and questions about McConnell’s health and his future in the Senate, the documentary traced the path to power of a consummate political operative who has dramatically reshaped the Supreme Court — and whose decisions helped usher in an era of deep polarization in both the U.S. and the Republican Party.
The above excerpt goes inside two defining and interlinked elements of McConnell’s legacy: His successful quest to cement a conservative Supreme Court majority, and his role in Trump’s 2016 election to the presidency.
As the documentary recounts, McConnell announced that he would block any Senate consideration of then-President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee after Justice Antonin Scalia died months before the 2016 presidential election. McConnell’s move came as then-candidate Donald Trump was rising in the Republican ranks through a campaign that, according to NPR’s Tom Dreisbach in the above excerpt, “was often outright racist.”
McConnell — once an advocate of civil rights — was no fan of Trump’s, according to sources in the documentary.
“Mitch McConnell understood Trump’s lies,” conservative columnist George Will tells FRONTLINE. “And he understood the coarseness and the vulgarity and the general seaminess of it all.”
But McConnell ultimately put his support behind Trump, framing the Supreme Court as a central issue.
“On that sad day when we lost Justice Scalia, I made another pledge that Obama would not fill this seat,” McConnell said at the 2016 Republican National Convention. “That honor will go to Donald Trump next year.”
McConnell’s moves were key in cementing both Trump’s victory and an eventual Supreme Court conservative majority, those interviewed in the documentary say.
“There was a lot of skepticism on the right of what Donald Trump was, and holding that Supreme Court seat open just as a political matter reminded Republicans, we can’t leave to chance that Hillary Clinton might put a liberal on the court,” Scott Jennings, a McConnell political adviser, says in the excerpt.
The impact of McConnell’s 2016 maneuvering continues to reverberate throughout American politics.
“Mind you, in 2016, Donald Trump was not the figure that he is today,” Keith Runyon, who worked for Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky for forty years, says in the excerpt. “He was not inevitable.”
“If Scalia had not died then, and certainly if McConnell had not said what he did, Trump would not have been elected,” George Will says in the excerpt. “One of the interesting caroms of politics is that Mitch McConnell brought about the election of someone who, in almost every particular, he deplored.”
For the full story on McConnell and Trump’s relationship — including in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack — watch McConnell, the GOP & the Court. Through interviews with close advisors and associates, critics, biographers and journalists, the documentary tells the dramatic, decades-long story of McConnell’s rise to power, the costs of attaining and keeping it, and how McConnell’s choices over the years have transformed the Supreme Court and U.S. politics.
McConnell, the GOP & the Court is a FRONTLINE production with the Kirk Documentary Group. The director is Michael Kirk. The producers are Michael Kirk, Mike Wiser and Vanessa Fica. The writers are Michael Kirk and Mike Wiser. The reporter is Vanessa Fica. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.
This is an update of a story that originally published Oct. 31, 2023.
