Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week the biggest news in politics has nothing to do with the presidential election — it’s the decision by Mitch McConnell to step down after leading the Senate Republicans for seventeen years. McConnell’s choice to exit was inevitably going to come at some point, and announcing it this early allows him to escape the many questions about how he’d potentially work with President Trump in the future. McConnell doesn’t want to have to play pretend, and after his bout with recent health issues, he also eliminates the ability of Democrats to play games of comparison around Joe Biden’s age and enfeebled nature. It’s going out in a time of his own choosing — in sports, business and politics, that’s a rare thing to accomplish.
McConnell’s legacy will be debated in the coming months, but it’s impossible to comprehend how much he has been the deciding factor in the direction of the party for the past two decades. The impact he had on the judiciary is unmatched in the history of the country. The way he ruled the Senate, criticized by many, also charted the path for legislation from the top down. But he also should be appreciated as perhaps the last fusionist leader, grounded in the era of Ronald Reagan.
Elected to the Senate at the young age of forty-two in the Reagan “Morning in America” curb-stomping of Walter Mondale in 1984, McConnell toppled the incumbent Democrat to win his first Senate election by about 5,000 votes. It was the closest race of the cycle, and the only GOP Senate flip. McConnell would truly start to make his mark on the body as a political operator more than a decade later, when he took over the NRSC and climbed the ranks of leadership.
McConnell’s relationship with donors was a powerful weapon that he used to try and shape the character of the body — with meandering success, and in the Tea Party era, notable failures. Yet not so when it came to actually running the Senate how he pleased, his capabilities were rarely matched. It’s not wrong to think of him as a stubborn Bill Belichick: hated when you were coaching across the field from him, but also hated for how often he was good at it.
The question now becomes: who will replace someone this significant? And what does the Senate want out of their next leader? I ran through the options here. Given that this decision will come in the wake of the November election, much of this has to do with how close the Senate wants their leader to be to Donald Trump, who may very well be back in the White House.
The Senate certainly has a stronger representation of pro-Trump figures than it did in 2016, but they’re still not a majority of the conference — in fact, as one pro-Trump senator told me yesterday, a secret ballot would probably still find a majority opposed to Trump’s renomination. But they do have to work with him, and they want to have a meaningful impact on the policy decisions to serve the interests of multiple senators.
There’s also the generational issue — going from an eighty-two-year-old to someone in their seventies, such as Texas’s John Cornyn or John Barrasso of Wyoming, may not be a significant enough step for the younger crew. While John Thune has to be considered the front-runner at this point, there are several other options — including Montana’s Steve Daines, currently at the NRSC, or Florida’s Rick Scott, who was backed by some in a protest vote against McConnell last year. And there’s always the possibility that someone like Marco Rubio wants to finally take the reins.
For my money, though, the dark horse who may emerge as making the most sense is Tom Cotton of Arkansas. He’s not yet fifty, gets along well with multiple factions and has navigated his relationship with Trump carefully. He also voted, along with twenty-eight other GOP senators, against the recent Ukraine aid bill despite his reputation for hawkishness. Whether the old hands of the Senate GOP are comfortable with him as their leader, though, is another question entirely. When generational shifts happen, they can happen quite suddenly — and Washington has been waiting on such a shift for a very long time.
Listen to our latest episode of the Thunderdome podcast here, on this and more.
Cornyn Blitzes For Leadership
Cornyn, the first GOP senator to officially jump into the race to succeed Mitch McConnell, has been talking to any Republican with a pulse to try to gin up support for his bid to be Senate Republican leader. In fact, Cornyn’s call with Lake came as another potential McConnell successor, GOP Conference Chair John Barrasso, was out in Arizona campaigning for her.
Cornyn’s blitz includes nearly every member of his conference and the most important Republican in the country — former President Donald Trump.
The 72-year-old Cornyn, who’s been in the Senate since 2002, has been very aggressive out of the gate. Cornyn is relying heavily on moves he’s previously made on the fundraising front, including raking in money for GOP incumbents and candidates even before they ask for it.
Remember, Cornyn doesn’t currently serve in elected leadership, although he’s part of McConnell’s inner circle. Cornyn, who twice served as NRSC chair, was term-limited out of the GOP whip job in 2019. That puts him at a disadvantage compared to Barrasso or Senate Minority Whip John Thune. Barrasso won’t say anything yet about his intentions for the race, while Thune is still looking at it.
“I’ve been telling people for a long time now that I was interested in succeeding Mitch,” Cornyn told us, later recounting how he communicated this directly to Thune when the South Dakota Republican succeeded him as whip. “It’s no secret.”
Cornyn added: “And I think there would be a lot of speculation about who’s in and who’s out, and I didn’t see any benefit in waiting.”
Cornyn may have the most at stake here of any potential McConnell successor. Cornyn is up for reelection in 2026, and a lack of a leadership post could be a factor in whether he stays. Cornyn — who serves on the Finance, Judiciary and Intelligence panels — told us he intends to run for reelection.
The rest of the field is being much more cautious so far. Thune’s office released a statement saying he’d call around to senators to find out “what they would like to see in their next leader.”
Barrasso, who is sailing to reelection this year, was in Arizona Thursday with Lake.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) wrote on X thanking a House member for saying he’d make a good GOP leader (Scott was easily defeated by McConnell in a Nov. 2022 leadership challenge). And NRSC Chair Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who’s being encouraged by Trump to run, says he’s laser-focused on winning the Senate majority.
To some potential candidates, there’s no particular rush, especially since the race itself will be a long slog — eight months.
The case for Cornyn: There are some obvious strengths here for the Texas Republican. First, his fundraising abilities are similar to those of McConnell. Cornyn can raise a lot of money fast, and he’s been very deliberate in spreading it around the conference.
According to a source familiar with Cornyn’s political operation, he has raised $13 million for the NRSC, GOP incumbents and candidates so far in the 2024 cycle. Cumulatively, Cornyn has been the top Senate GOP fundraiser over the last decade except for McConnell.
“I come from a big state which is the ATM for Republicans,” Cornyn joked. “And people expect the leader to raise money for the team.”
Cornyn also served as GOP whip during a consequential period in Trump’s presidency, helping shepherd through the former president’s tax overhaul bill and dozens of judicial appointments. Cornyn told us he reminded Trump of that when they spoke on Wednesday.
Possible fault lines: After leaving the whip job, Cornyn was a central player in several of the Senate’s bipartisan achievements during the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency. This includes the CHIPS Act and the gun safety bill.
Cornyn’s involvement in the latter drew complaints from Senate conservatives and back home, as well as from Trump, who called him a “RINO.” But following the horrific Uvalde school shooting in 2022, Cornyn said even Texas lawmakers knew that changes to gun laws were necessary.
Cornyn also criticized Trump following the 2020 election, saying his “time has passed.” Cornyn told us he thinks Trump is willing to “bury the hatchet.”
“You remember the things that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham have said?” Cornyn noted. “[Trump] doesn’t really hold a grudge unless you’re in constant battle with him.”
But Cornyn also suggested to us that, if Trump is president and he’s the GOP leader, he would push back when necessary:
“One of the best services that you can provide somebody like President Trump is to tell him the truth. He may choose not to believe it, he may choose to do something different. But it’s important to me personally as a matter of personal integrity to always tell the truth.”
On Navalny’s Courage
People unfortunate enough to live under tyranny must swallow bitter poison between every breath. That poison is fear. Fear strips away humanity and leaves behind a panicked animal, hoping only to survive. Fear demands obedience, conformity, sycophancy—the adulation of all that one hates most. Each moment is an anguish of doubt. Children know, or soon learn, that some topics of conversation will destroy their parents. One ill-chosen word and you will never find work again. One careless letter, written in frustration, and you end up in the gulag. One act of open defiance and you are dead.
French revolutionaries coined the word “terrorism” to mark the amount of government-induced fear needed to subdue the population. It worked quite effectively then, and it works still. But the method has a vulnerability: the fearless individual. Fearlessness in the face of mortal threat is an extremely rare quality, possessed by one in a million people, but it’s also contagious. The example of that one courageous person restores the humanity of others, who recall, with shame, that they, too, have a will and voice of their own. Once fear is lost, tyranny collapses. Speaking to the multitudes in his native Poland, Pope John Paul II began the dissolution of the Communist empire with three words: “Be not afraid.”
Alexei Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition figure, died under suspicious circumstances on February 16 in an Arctic prison camp that serves as a useful reminder of Soviet brutality. His was a death foretold. In fact, he had been murdered once before. As a blogger and social media activist, and later as a politician, he had been relentless in his opposition to the regime: he spoke of the “virus of freedom,” of which he was a carrier. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s supreme hit man, simply could not run the risk of contagion. He had Navalny secretly exposed to a lethal nerve agent, Novichok—another handy legacy of Soviet criminality.
Somehow Navalny survived and, following much public outcry, was allowed to recover in a German hospital. He returned from the land of the dead looking like a corpse but morally unchanged. “I assert that Putin is behind this act, I don’t see any other explanation,” he said of his poisoning. “The system is fighting for survival and we’ve just felt the consequences.” To his remarkable wife, Yulia, he joked, “Putin’s supposed to be, like, not so stupid to use this Novichok. . . . If you want to kill someone, just shoot him.”
After the poisoning, Navalny was together with his wife and family in the relative safety in a free country. He had done more than his duty, offering up his life to Russia and to freedom. Who among us wouldn’t have seized the chance to enjoy a bit of peace and normality? But that is the mystery of people of great courage: they exist almost symbolically, in the realm of myth. Navalny never considered becoming a permanent exile. Some compulsive sense of who he was drew him to his second death. During the months spent outside Russia, a CNN documentary, Navalny, made him known to a global audience. His growing fame clearly irritated Putin, who referred to him as “the Berlin patient,” as if afraid to say his name. There was no question about what would happen to him once he returned.
In one sense, Navalny was a rebel of the digital age. His politics were mutable and confused, but he knew with total clarity what he stood against. From a broader perspective, however, he can be said to descend from a long and venerable line of Russian “dissidents”—people like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and the mostly forgotten victims of tyranny chronicled in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, who suffered and died to retain a shred of decency in their society. Russia, a synonym for despotism, historically misgoverned, has been one of the world’s leading producers of political heroism—but unhappy the nation that needs, and wastes, the lives of so many heroes to balance its shame.
We in the U.S. suffer from the opposite condition. Our lives are soft and easy, but we are lacking in courage. We move in great conformist herds, terrified that a single original thought might knock us out of step and reveal us to the world, in all our appalling helplessness, as individuals. We are told by tribal elders which words to use and which are taboo—these change constantly, since it’s a training regime in obedience. We are afraid of the Internet mob. We are afraid of getting cancelled and losing our jobs. The youngest adult Americans are afraid of sex and of each other and of life itself.
None of us faces the threat of death by Novichok, but we fear the poison of loneliness—because the curse of the courageous person, more punishing even than physical persecution, is moral and existential isolation. So we move uneasily with the herd. We are aware that our lives are false, that our public expressions are often lies, that we pretend to embrace what we disbelieve and to love what we hate. We are aware and ashamed, and we compensate by inventing shallow dramas with ourselves as protagonists. Personal identity as a theatrical performance is our ultimate leap into unreality. The cure for self-loathing, we have decided, is narcissism.
Navalny is what fear prevents us from becoming—what we would be if we absorbed Aristotle’s lesson that courage is the highest virtue, because it makes all the others possible. We like to think of ourselves as tolerant and inclusive, but what does that matter, if we can be compelled by fear to participate in pogroms and inquisitions? What is the point of political freedom, if we are in thrall to an inner tyranny? For the fearful, even the best of them, every principle is contingent, every virtue negotiable.
Because we are who we are, our elegies for Navalny are haunted as if by his pale ghost, come back from the dead yet again to utter the terrible words he used to condemn his judges: “You are the people who look the other way.” One event in particular haunts us: his return to Russia. When Navalny boarded the flight for Moscow, he knew that it was a journey to the graveyard. We pretend to praise and applaud this act of self-destruction, but if we are honest, as for once we must be, we’ll admit that it is incomprehensible to us. What American today would do the same? We are the people who look the other way.
Feature
Items of Interest
Foreign
Putin’s plans for sending migrants west.
Why Trump’s NATO demands make sense.
Navalny’s funeral draws heavy police presence.
Why the Israel Palestine debate is haunting Labour.
George Galloway wins by-election in Rochdale.
Domestic
Mike Johnson could deploy Trump in House battle.
Republicans struggle to figure out IVF messaging.
Mark Green decides to run for reelection.
The Michigan GOP is in disarray.
Lawfare
Fani Willis trial could be headed off the rails.
Hunter Biden takes on House Republicans.
The Supreme Court infuriates Jack Smith.
Jack Smith camp frustrated by timeline.
2024
The private chats and encounters that shape Joe Biden’s thinking.
Biden aides work to shield president.
Media
Mehdi Hasan goes scorched earth on Biden.
Cable news braces for big pay cuts.
Tech
Shriver: How Google AI erases white people.
Ephemera
A remembrance of Richard Lewis.
How you subsidized Travis Kelce’s Hollywood debut.
Leah McSweeney’s chaotic lawsuit against Andy Cohen.
Will Forte pushes for Coyote vs. Acme release.
James Gunn announces Superman movie name change.
What you need to know going into Dune Part Two.
What Denis Villeneuve is willing into existence.
Podcast
Quote
“Christ says, "Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good...Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked--the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”
— C.S. Lewis