![]() Still, his statements about Trump during the 2016 campaign, as the future president gradually cowed into submission the party to which McConnell had dedicated his entire adult life, managed to simultaneously leave everything and nothing to the imagination. “You’ve got to see the gears turning behind the eyes, because the mouth isn’t moving very much,” Ryan told me. McConnell, who has represented Kentucky in the Senate for 34 years and, as of last June, is the longest-serving Republican leader in Senate history, is one of Washington’s most famously inexpressive creatures. And that has basically been the sum and substance of his contribution.” “He’s been very quiet,” Dick Durbin, the Democratic minority whip, who was in recent shutdown-negotiation meetings with McConnell and the Democratic Senate leadership, told me that afternoon, “and has said repeatedly that he’s not going to call any bill that the president doesn’t approve of. Or here McConnell was, at least: marooned in a newly divided Congress, trying hard to stay out of the light. ![]() “I spoke to him and tried to get the plan back on track, but that just wasn’t in the cards. TRUMP,” under a legend reading, “WHAT BORDER FENCING DO DEMOCRATS SUPPORT?” But he knew as well as anyone that he had in fact negotiated at least a temporary escape from the looming shutdown with Paul Ryan, then the House speaker, in December, which would have funded the government through February, before “the president, let’s just say, changed his mind,” Ryan told me this month, laughing ruefully. McConnell went through the motions of fully blaming Pelosi, as he did on the Senate floor that morning, displaying a poster with two identical pictures of a Southern border wall, one labeled “PRES. “It’s just that I don’t have the votes that can consummate the deal.” Those votes could come only at the behest of Trump or the new House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, he insisted - and, McConnell continued, “it seems to me the principals, the only people who can make this deal, as of the moment we’re having this discussion, seem to both think they have a winning hand.” “I’ve been in the meetings,” McConnell, dressed in a pinstripe suit and a banker collar, said. Now the last speeches of the day were being made, the reporters had mostly gone and McConnell sat in his office, reciting an unfamiliar tale: that of his own powerlessness. ![]() Republican senators spent the lunch hour shuttling back and forth between Vice President Mike Pence and McConnell, sequestered in different quarters on the Capitol’s second floor. Then he decamped to the border for some photo ops with Customs and Border Protection officials. 10, Washington’s principal chaos agent, the president of the United States, had given a typically accusatory and free-associative news conference on the White House lawn, reiterating his demand for $5 billion in funding for a wall along the Mexican border and his intention to continue the shutdown without it. It was still there by midafternoon, drifting on the thermals over the mostly depopulated National Mall, wheeling occasionally past the window in the hallway outside the office where the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, sat on the 20th day of what would soon become the longest government shutdown in American history. At sunrise, there it was: a red-tailed hawk, its gyre widening over the United States Capitol building in the Creamsicle-colored light, like the world’s least subtle literary reference. ![]()
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