When he turned 10 years old, little Mitchie McConnell received a radio for his birthday. But unlike other children in Georgia, he used it to tune in to politics. Soon, McConnell knew where he stood: On school picture day, he wore an “I Like Ike” button so that he could be photographed supporting Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower for president. By 1960, Mitch, no longer Mitchie, could vote himself, and he cast his ballot for Eisenhower’s vice president: “I voted for Richard Nixon, proudly, and remember being deeply disappointed in the outcome.”
Even though McConnell was a Republican, he went on to back Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He was unhappy with Barry Goldwater because of his lack of support for civil rights. He also carefully studied Johnson’s career for insights into how to advance in the Senate. By the late 1960s, McConnell had become a participant in the political game, serving as an aide on Capitol Hill and even turning down a job in the Nixon White House in 1971. This was a good thing for McConnell, as joining the Nixon administration at that time might have snuffed a promising political career by getting him embroiled in the Watergate scandal.
McConnell eventually took a political appointment in the Ford administration, serving as deputy assistant attorney general for legislative affairs. In that position, he got to know Ford Justice Department aides such as Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork, and Laurence Silberman, all of whom would later become important federal judges. In 1984, McConnell ran for Senate from Kentucky with Ronald Reagan campaigning for him (although Reagan flubbed his name as Mitch “O’Donnell”). That same year, Vice President George H.W. Bush also campaigned for McConnell. Bush got McConnell’s name correct, but he got the title wrong, introducing him incorrectly as the “Mayor of Louisville.”
By the time McConnell got to Washington, any uncertainty about his identity disappeared. Every president since then has known McConnell personally and has had to take him into account. As McConnell prepares to step down from his leadership post in favor of Sen. John Thune (R-SD), it’s worth reflecting on his relationships with the past five presidents and what McConnell’s successors can learn from how McConnell handled each of them.
Bill Clinton did not have a close relationship with McConnell, but he sure knew who McConnell was. McConnell headed the powerful Senate Rules Committee when it was managing the process for Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In that role, McConnell wanted to make sure there was a full trial and that the Senate did not dismiss the charges against Clinton.
Although the Senate eventually acquitted Clinton, the embarrassed Clinton did not forget. In 2020, when McConnell moved to have a quick hearing to allow Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace the departed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Clinton blasted McConnell for having taken a different approach in 2016 to the nomination of Merrick Garland to replace the deceased Justice Scalia. Clinton told CNN, “I think it would be good for Sen. McConnell to make him feel better when he gets up in the morning if he proved that he wasn’t being a hypocrite at the time and he just stuck with his position.”
McConnell got along better with George W. Bush. They were ideologically compatible, and McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, served as labor secretary in the Bush administration. McConnell was also by now in a more elevated position, having joined the Senate leadership in 2003, in which he has served since, in a number of roles. He began as the Senate whip and then became Republican leader in 2007. As a member of leadership, he helped Bush pass important pieces of legislation, including the Medicare Modernization Act.
Still, Bush and McConnell weren’t exactly friends, and McConnell was willing to be critical of Bush when the situation warranted. After Bush’s poor debate showing against John Kerry in 2004, McConnell said, “It was a terrible performance. He was smirking and slouching, and the critics were essentially correct, he ran out of things to say.”
McConnell was also quite direct with Bush in person, telling him, for example, that he thought the United States should reduce troop levels in Iraq, adding that “your unpopularity is going to cost us control of the Congress.” Bush disagreed and thought that the U.S. should instead “surge” troops there to quell the terrorist insurgency. McConnell was right about the threat to Congress, as the Republicans lost badly in the 2006 elections, but Bush was right about the surge. According to Bush’s memoir, McConnell helped Bush get the funding for the surge and admitted that he had been wrong about reducing troop levels.
McConnell was direct with Bush about others as well. As Bush recalled, “At times, he would take me aside and share personal thoughts that he didn’t want to air in front of other senators.” Rob Portman, who served as the head of the Office of Management and Budget for Bush before becoming an Ohio senator, characterized the relationship as follows, “He and George Bush got along fine, but it was not a warm relationship.”
McConnell’s worst presidential relationship was probably with Barack Obama. They knew each other somewhat from Obama’s brief tenure in the Senate, and McConnell was unimpressed. As McConnell described Obama, “He’s like the kid in your class who exerts a hell of a lot of effort making sure everyone thinks he’s the smartest one in the room. He talks down to people, whether in a meeting among colleagues in the White House or addressing the nation.”
As the Republican leader, McConnell was well known during the Bush administration, but he was not the bête noire of the Democrats and the mainstream press until the Obama years. The most infamous moment was when the press reported that McConnell had pledged to make Obama a one-term president. This comment led to hysterical accusations that McConnell was some kind of traitor, but McConnell, as usual, was unmoved by press criticism. As he described his sentiment, “I don’t want the president to fail. I want him to change.” Even though Republicans had lost badly in the 2008 elections, giving the Democrats the White House and large majorities in both houses of Congress, McConnell, typically, had a strategic vision for what he wanted to accomplish. As he said of Obama’s agenda, “I’m going to be in the forefront of either trying to slow it down, modify it, or stop it altogether.”
McConnell seemed to be able to get in Obama’s head. At the 2013 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Obama joked about people telling him that he should socialize with McConnell more, perhaps even getting a drink with him. Revealing a great deal in a joke, Obama jibed, “Why don’t you have a drink with Mitch McConnell!” The far more cautious McConnell, who only gave interviews if he saw that he could benefit from doing so, would never have revealed so much for a laugh line. After the Republicans won back the Senate in 2014, Obama did try to cozy up somewhat to McConnell, pretending that he had an affinity for Kentucky bourbon, but it was unconvincing.
Obama made it pretty clear after the administration that he did not think much of McConnell. In his memoir, he described McConnell as “short, owlish, with a smooth Kentucky accent,” with “no aptitude for schmoozing, backslapping, or rousing oratory” and “no close friends even in his own caucus.” At the same time, Obama did grudgingly acknowledge that McConnell had “discipline, shrewdness, and shamelessness — all of which he employed in the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power.” An ironic observation coming from Obama.
McConnell, for his part, made it clear after the Obama years that he did not like Obama much, either. McConnell particularly disliked Obama’s habit of injecting himself into the political debate after he had left office. As McConnell said of Obama, “I think it is a little bit classless, frankly, to criticize an administration that comes after you,” adding, “You had your shot — you were there for eight years.” McConnell also contrasted Obama unfavorably to two presidents he admired more, both named George Bush, saying, “I remember President George W. Bush and his father went through eight years of Democratic administrations after they left office and kept their mouths shut because they didn’t feel it was appropriate for presidents to criticize even presidents of another party.” Little wonder that McConnell’s leadership office was adorned with images of four presidents: Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan — and both Bushes.
McConnell did not succeed in making Obama a one-term president, but he sure was successful in slowing the Obama agenda. Obama stopped passing major legislation after losing the House in the 2010 midterm elections, and eventually, Republicans won back the Senate as well in 2014. By the end, McConnell recalled in 2019, the tables had been turned completely, so much so that McConnell bragged, “I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.”
With the return of a Republican president in Donald Trump, it seemed like McConnell might once again have a president he liked. Things started off promisingly. McConnell’s staunch position in preventing Garland from succeeding Scalia on the Supreme Court put the court on the ballot in the 2016 election and helped Trump win over doubting conservatives. McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, was back in the Cabinet, this time as transportation secretary. And Trump and McConnell were aligned and worked together on key parts of the Trump agenda, including tax cuts, moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and confirming conservative judges to the courts and justices to the Supreme Court. Yet, while they had these policy alignments, the two men were stylistically very different, which made it hard for them to get along.
Common interests kept McConnell and Trump largely aligned during most of the Trump years. But things went south between the two men after the Jan. 6, 2021, takeover of the Capitol by Trump supporters. McConnell was an institutionalist and particularly loved Congress, and he could not abide the riot, saying, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people. And they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like.” McConnell seemed initially inclined to support Trump’s impeachment but did not do so under the theory that Congress could not impeach a former president.
Ironically, McConnell’s best interpersonal relationship with any president during his long political career was with Joe Biden. Biden was the only long-standing senator to serve as president during McConnell’s Senate tenure, so the closeness of the relationship makes some sense, notwithstanding the ideological distance between the two men.
The seeds of this relationship were sown in the Obama years. Sixteen years ago, McConnell said of incoming Vice President Joe Biden that “Joe’s a good guy. He’s a motormouth. He’s the kind of guy, my dad used to say, if you ask him what time it is, he’ll tell you how to make a watch.” He found in Biden someone in the Obama administration with whom he could negotiate. During the 2013 fiscal cliff talks, McConnell called Biden and asked, “Is there anyone over there who knows how to make a deal?” He also trusted Biden, observing, in implicit contrast to others in Obama’s orbit, that the vice president “doesn’t break his word. He doesn’t waste time telling me why I’m wrong. He gets down to brass tacks. And he keeps in sight the stakes.” Biden admired McConnell as well, giving him a tremendous senatorial compliment: “Mitch knows how to count better than anyone else I have ever known.”
But McConnell was also willing to criticize. When President Biden went over the top in his rhetoric on voting rights, suggesting that all who disagree with him were racists, McConnell called him out, saying that Biden’s speech was “abandoning rational persuasion for pure demagoguery.” Such criticism did not prevent them from working together or praising one another, though. Late in Biden’s presidency, he said that he and McConnell had a history of “working together in good faith even though we have many political disagreements.”
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As for Trump, the McConnell-Trump relationship broke during the Biden years. Trump made multiple anti-Asian comments about McConnell’s wife. McConnell endorsed Trump for reelection, but only after Trump had won the nomination again. In Michael Tackett’s recent McConnell biography, he described Trump as “not very smart, irascible, nasty, just about every quality you would not want somebody to have.” If McConnell were not stepping down from his leadership post because of age, he would probably have had to as a result of his broken relationship with Trump.
Despite this poor end, McConnell’s interactions with seven presidents as senator have brought about tremendous accomplishments. He is probably more responsible than anyone except perhaps Leonard Leo for reshaping the courts and the judiciary. He has cut taxes multiple times and consistently pressed for a strong America in foreign policy. Even when dealt a weak hand, such as in the early Obama years, he demonstrated a remarkable capacity to play defense and turn things around. As Tackett wrote of him, “He is a master of talent, scouting, and opportunism, of planning and execution, in the business of politics, where winning is the measure of success.” McConnell may not have made lasting friendships with most of the presidents he dealt with, but he did bring about lasting change. New leader John Thune would be wise to study McConnell’s example to learn how to make the most of his incoming Senate majority.
Washington Examiner contributing writer Tevi Troy is a senior fellow at the Reagan Institute and a former senior White House aide. He is the author of five books on the presidency, most recently The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.