Mitch McConnell sat at his desk on Tuesday, January 26, 2021, agonizing over how to cast what he knew would be one of the most pivotal votes of his career. Since the harrowing events of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, the Senate GOP leader — recently demoted to the minority — has been almost certain his party would finally shun Trump, a development he greeted with a sense of relief. The former president, he was sure, had committed acts of censure and was a toxic danger to democracy. But while McConnell was ready to be done with Trump, his party, it seemed, was not. To his dismay, a large chunk of his membership once again rallied around the former president. And they were about to put him in a bind. That afternoon, Sen. Rand Paul, the younger and much more pro-MAGA running mate of McConnell’s Kentucky delegation, forced all senators to go on the record and declare whether a post-presidential conviction of Trump was constitutional. It was a question McConnell had been grappling with in the two weeks since the House impeached him — and he wasn’t yet ready to answer it. The vote, McConnell knew, would be seen as a test for the upcoming impeachment trial, making the stakes of his selection incredibly high. If GOP senators, under his leadership, were willing to uphold the constitutionality of the proceedings, it would mean that Trump’s conviction was a real possibility. But if they voted against it, condemning the entire trial, it would portend that Republicans would likely help the former president avoid responsibility — something McConnell was loathe to do. This account of McConnell’s role in weighing Trump’s second impeachment trial is based on interviews with people familiar with McConnell’s thinking and thoughts, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak candidly. McConnell knew that many of his employees were torn about how to handle the situation—and that in their uncertainty, they would look to him for guidance. If he declared the trial constitutional, breaking with Trump in the process, he could set the stage for a partisan mutiny, helping the GOP turn the page on Trump for good. It was an attractive prospect: Conviction could allow the Senate to bar Trump from running for office again — and McConnell never wanted Trump in office again. But in all his years as GOP leader, McConnell had never led such a rebellion. And that day, he wasn’t sure he was up to the task. On the office wall above McConnell’s head was a portrait of his mentor, the late Kentucky Senator John Sherman Cooper, for whom he had been imprisoned in the summer of 1964. Cooper, a Republican, had helped pass the Act for Civil Rights than a flood of angry pro-segregation letters he had received from his constituents. The 20-year-old McConnell once asked Cooper how he reconciled his vote with what his constituents wanted. “There are times you follow and times you lead,” Cooper had told him, a saying that stuck with McConnell decades later. Was this McConnell’s moment to lead? And if he did, would enough Republicans follow him to make it worthwhile? McConnell was still reeling from the Capitol siege. On the night of the riot, when he returned to the building from Fort McNair, he had seen the splintered wood on the Capitol suite door left by raiders who had tried to break into his office and attack his staff. He had watched, stunned, as his assistants moved the furniture they had used to block the entrance to make room for his return. Overcome with emotion from the trauma they had experienced, McConnell had administered an oath to his assistants. The Attack: Before, During and After the Attack on the Capitol “We all knew Trump was crazy,” he had said. “I’m done with him. I will never speak to him again.” For a while, it looked like McConnell’s confidence was well placed. In the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, Republicans across the political spectrum had turned on Trump, calling for him to resign. The day after the uprising, McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, resigned as transportation secretary, prompting other cabinet members to follow suit. The exodus was so great, in fact, that McConnell began to fear that Trump, left untethered, might start acting on his worst instincts. He personally urged top Trump officials, including White House adviser Pat Cipollone and national security adviser Robert O’Brien, to follow through on their terms, looking to them to restrain a president who had already proven himself a threat to the nation. McConnell was surprised at how quickly that strong anti-Trump sentiment had faded by the time the House voted on impeachment, an impeachment supported by just ten Republicans. It was clear that many of its members still feared that the outgoing president and his loyal base would come after them if they broke with Trump. In the days after the uprising, as anger at Trump gave way to panic that his impeachment could cost lawmakers their jobs, a large number of Senate Republicans also frantically sought an escape hatch — a way to vote against impeachment without defending what Trump had done. These senators had found salvation in a January 12 Washington Post op-ed written by noted conservative attorney J. Michael Luttig, who had served as a US Court of Appeals judge for fifteen years. In it, Luttig argued that it was unconstitutional for a former president to be impeached — or for the Senate to impeach a former president who was impeached while in office. The next morning, as the House prepared to impeach Trump again, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton sent the article to his colleagues. Soon, Trump’s most hardline defenders were obsessing over the idea, pushing other senators to embrace the argument as a reason to oppose removal. McConnell himself wasn’t convinced by Luttig’s logic — and he knew some of his GOP colleagues weren’t either. His argument seemed “procedurally off the rails.” And McConnell still wasn’t sure he wanted one. In a series of meetings, McConnell and a host of skeptical GOP senators debated the merits of a similar argument with his trusted legal adviser since the first impeachment, Andrew Ferguson. Ferguson, who had narrowly escaped rioters as they tore through the Capitol on Jan. 6, had wrestled with the issue for days and concluded that the Founders saw impeachment only as a means of removing people still in office their. He pointed out that Benjamin Franklin once argued that impeachment was a necessary constitutional escape to remove a tyrant because the only other solution was assassination—and nobody wanted that. Since there was no way to convene the Senate and expedite a trial in the days remaining before Biden’s inauguration, Trump could not be convicted, Ferguson advised his boss and members. McConnell, still skeptical, questioned his lawyer: Why would the Founders give Congress absolute power to subpoena the Constitution if it was limited? he wanted to know. Why would the Founders include a provision in the Constitution that would bar anyone from running for office again – just to limit a conviction to current incumbents? Ferguson acknowledged it was a tough question. But if McConnell’s end game was to prevent Trump from running for office again, Ferguson warned, a Senate conviction was no guarantee of that goal. Some scholars believed that the Constitution did not actually allow an impeached president to be impeached again, as judges and other public officials did, he explained to McConnell and other Democrats considering impeachment. It was a minority view with which few constitutional experts agreed, Ferguson acknowledged, noting that he personally did not accept it either. But it didn’t matter: Trump could try to run again in 2024 and sue any state that kept him off the ballot, he said. It would turn into an explosive legal battle that would catapult the former president back into the headlines, possibly reigniting his efforts to stage a political comeback just as the party was trying to heal. “Banning him from office would not be a slam dunk,” Ferguson warned. As McConnell pondered what to do, he entertained other arguments for and against the conviction from various corners of the GOP. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) made a personal plea for McConnell to use his leadership position to go against the president to give rank-and-file Republicans political cover to do the same. She pressed him in a series of phone calls to bring the Senate back from a congressional recess before the Biden inauguration and quickly condemn Trump before he leaves office. Republicans would follow suit, he insisted to McConnell. Moreover, Trump was still a constant threat to the country. McConnell told Cheney he did not disagree with her last point, though he was adamant that logistically the Senate could not impeach Trump in a week. In his view, Trump deserved the right to find a lawyer and prepare a defense regardless of how guilty he was. But McConnell also recognized another fear in Cheney that had begun to seep into his psyche: that the conviction might make Trump a martyr in the eyes of his followers, strengthening him in the long run. This could pose an even greater threat to the Republican Party, he feared. “We do not disagree on the substance. we just disagree on tactics,” McConnell told Cheney as they discussed how to free the Republican Party from Trump’s iron grip. “Let’s ignore him.” Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (RS.C.), the longtime…
