Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the longest-serving U.S. Senate party leader in history, will step down from his leadership role at the end of this year, McConnell announced from the Senate floor on Wednesday.
“It is time for the next generation of leadership,” McConnell said.
In his speech announcing his intention, the Senate minority leader appeared to allude to the ideological divisions within his party. The side led by former President Donald Trump — who appears on track to become the party’s 2024 presidential nominee and with whom McConnell has had a tumultuous relationship — opposes a foreign aid and national security package including $60 billion for Ukraine that was championed by McConnell in the Senate and has now stalled in the Republican-led House.
“Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular moment in time. I have many faults. Misunderstanding politics is not one of them,” McConnell said. “That said, I believe more strongly than ever that America’s global leadership is essential to preserving the shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan discussed.”
FRONTLINE examined McConnell’s lengthy career, his relationship with Trump, and how his shrewd choices reshaped the Supreme Court and U.S. politics in the October 2023 documentary McConnell, the GOP & the Court.
“I’m not sure who would replace him if he weren’t there,” McConnell’s close associate, former U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), told FRONTLINE in the documentary. “Because right now he’s the indispensable figure in the Republican Party, as well as the American government, for a stable, center-right point of view.”
For context on this moment and the 82-year-old McConnell’s influence on U.S. politics, watch McConnell, the GOP & the Court, which is embedded above and is also available to stream on the PBS App, on YouTube and on the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. From FRONTLINE filmmaker Michael Kirk and his team, the documentary chronicles the dramatic, decades-long story of McConnell’s rise to power, and the costs of attaining and keeping it.
McConnell, the GOP & the Court delves into McConnell’s defining early struggle against childhood polio, his formative time growing up as a Republican in then-heavily-Democratic Kentucky, and his election to the U.S. Senate in 1984. Then, the film examines how McConnell rose to become a consummate and highly effective political operative whose decisions would usher in a new phase of polarization in U.S. politics.
In particular, the documentary probes two defining and interlinked elements of McConnell’s legacy: His successful quest to cement a conservative Supreme Court majority, and his role in Trump’s ascent to the presidency despite his misgivings.
“One of the interesting caroms of politics is that Mitch McConnell brought about the election of someone who, in almost every particular, he deplored,” conservative columnist George Will said in the documentary.
Culminating under Trump, McConnell’s actions “remade the federal judiciary and the United States Supreme Court,” McConnell biographer Michael Tackett told FRONTLINE in the film. “To put three people on the Supreme Court, we’ve already seen some very fundamental changes in American life, not the least of which was the overturning of Roe v. Wade.”
Through interviews with close advisors and associates, critics, biographers and journalists, McConnell, the GOP & the Court traces McConnell’s political journey from his days as a supporter of the civil rights movement to his shift rightward in the Reagan era, to his reluctant embrace of Trump and then his anger at the president on January 6th, 2021, to his 2023 health scares and questions about how long he would continue to lead Senate Republicans.
“He is balancing a heck of a lot. And he’s sort of a leader in a party that he doesn’t really know anymore,” Kentucky journalist James Robert Carroll, who has covered McConnell for years, said in the documentary. “How long does he want to do that? And how long do they want him to do that? That’s the other question.”
Watch McConnell, the GOP & the Court at pbs.org/frontline, in the PBS App, on YouTube and on the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. And for more on McConnell’s role in transforming the Supreme Court, watch Supreme Revenge: Battle for the Court, also available on streaming platforms.
