In an op-ed in the Lexington Herald-Ledger, author John David Dyche blasted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for failing the country by refusing to stand up to Donald Trump.
Dyche, who penned the 2009 biography of McConnell titled “Republican Leader,” was recently asked by a publication if he would write a piece on McConnell that would be published as his obituary “on the occasion of his death.”
Dyche, however, declined, explaining that if he was to say anything about McConnell, he would prefer to say it while the Minority Leader is still alive.
In a previous column that Dyche wrote for the Kentucky Lantern, he apologized for supporting Republicans like Mitch McConnell who abandoned conservatism to “support or collaborate with Trump,” whom Dyche described as “the antithesis of true conservatism.”
While Dyche conceded that he liked and respected McConnell for his “brilliant, if always Machiavellian, political mind and skills,” since Donald Trump’s takeover of the GOP, McConnell’s political skills “failed him at critical times.”
He said McConnell underestimated Trump and the “MAGA movement,” despite countless warnings from conservatives.
Dyche said McConnell believed that Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump in 2016 and after Trump won, the senator thought he could “manipulate and use Trump.” While Dyche thinks McConnell was right to think that “to some extent,” he said McConnell was “dangerously wrong” in more significant ways.
He argued that McConnell’s role in collaborating with normalizing Trump’s “vulgar demagoguery” and cruel proto-fascism had “destructive consequences for our constitutional democracy.”
Dyche blasted McConnell for refusing to push for Trump’s impeachment following the January 6 riot and failing to vote for his conviction in the Senate trial. He suggested that McConnell was a coward for backing down from his harsh words following the riot by later saying he would support Trump if he became the Republican nominee in 2024.
Dyche concluded his op-ed by arguing that Mitch McConnell’s true legacy would be his failure to be a true “national leader” to the country “at its moment of maximum peril.”
