After Mitch McConnell finally announced his plans to pack up his toys and go home, MSNBC's Jen Psaki took a "bit of a deep dive" into his legacy. And she didn't mince words, summing up the Republican Senate leader as a "diminished," power-hungry hypocrite "only to be swallowed by the monster that he enabled to obtain it." (See video below, posted by Inside with Jen Psaki.)
Psaki begins by reminding us that, remarkably, McConnell had actually championed campaign finance reform in the 1970s, "only to do a complete 180 in the U.S. Senate, where he became instrumental in opening up our politics to the flood of special interest dark money."
"He was for voting rights," she continued, "until he realized that suppressing the vote might help Republicans win election."
And then, of course, she reminisces about his crowning moment in 2016, when, "for 11 months, he stonewalled an appointment for a Supreme Court Justice under Barack Obama," only to "fast-forward just a couple years to 2020, when he flipped on his own McConnell rule." And thus, an extreme, Trump-molded MAGA court that overturned Roe vs. Wade, with more authoritarian rulings to come.
"But here's the thing," she says of McConnell, who blasted Donald Trump for the J6 Capitol riots, only to later vote to acquit him. "McConnell racked up all those wins, while supporting and building up a man that he despises and knows is destructive, because he always saw Trump as a means to an end."
And yet that coveted "end," she points out, left McConnell utterly impotent. "And that's the real legacy of Mitch McConnell: a cynic focused on power only to be swallowed by the monster that he enabled to obtain it."
As McConnell hero Ronald Reagan once said, "To sit back hoping that someday, some way, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last — but eat you he will."
