STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
A new book tells a story about Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. It was in 2021 during the second impeachment trial for former President Trump. A columnist close to McConnell drafted an article saying McConnell would vote to convict Trump for the attack on the Capitol on January 6. That's how close McConnell was to voting against Trump. That draft was never published because McConnell voted to acquit instead.
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MITCH MCCONNELL: We have no power to convict and disqualify a former office holder who is now a private citizen.
INSKEEP: Michael Tackett describes that moment as McConnell's worst political miscalculation because he was hoping to be rid of Trump and thought somebody else would do it. The book is called "The Price Of Power," and it's based on more than 50 hours of interviews with the Kentucky senator. Tackett describes McConnell as a competitor who's been driven ever since a childhood struggle with polio.
MICHAEL TACKETT: There are some common traits for polio survivors, and one of them is they tend to be extreme strivers.
INSKEEP: Any idea why it would be?
TACKETT: Just this idea that, OK, this disease didn't defeat me. I'm not one of those more or less fortunate people in a wheelchair, so I'm going to make something out of myself and I'm not going to let anything stop me.
INSKEEP: People who dislike Mitch McConnell, maybe even people who respect Mitch McConnell, see him as the ultimate implacable partisan. Do you see him that way?
TACKETT: I think that he has a ledger, and the ledger has entries on both sides. To those who see him as that implacable force, they have good grist for their argument. Perhaps the best is when he blocked Merrick Garland from even getting a hearing on the Supreme Court.
INSKEEP: Because he wanted Republicans to nominate the next justice?
TACKETT: Right, and that was just blunt force power that he did because he could. They sort of came up with a confection of a precedent, but there really wasn't one. So that, you know, I think is on the negative side of his ledger. The second thing that people, I think, point to rightly is the second impeachment, when he had a choice to whether or not he would vote to convict President Trump after saying quite clearly both to me and even publicly that he thought what he had done is commit impeachable offenses.
INSKEEP: Was his decision solely about his interpretation of the Constitution?
TACKETT: No. It was clearly - there was a political calculus at work, too.
INSKEEP: So McConnell has his opinion of January 6, decides not to act on it during impeachment, thinks Trump is going to go away. And did he then make efforts to make Trump go away?
TACKETT: So one of the biggest megaphones that Trump has had is the Fox network, even though he goes hot and cold on whether or not he likes them one day or doesn't like them another. And Senator McConnell did what he could in trying to get the Fox network to not embrace everything that President Trump stood for. And there was a moment where in June of 2022, he and the former speaker, Paul Ryan, who is on the Fox board, had a dinner with Rupert Murdoch and his son at Ryan's home in the Washington suburbs. And they came away from that meeting thinking that Murdoch agreed with them that Trump was not good for the Republican Party. But I think if we look at the record since then, there's no evidence that Fox has pulled back.
INSKEEP: Why would Senator McConnell, now very late in his career, having said what he said about former President Trump, endorse him for another term as president this year?
TACKETT: He did not believe that he could continue to serve as his party's leader in the Senate if he didn't agree to support the nominee. I think he cares very deeply about who wins the majority of the Senate, maybe even more than who wins the race for the White House.
INSKEEP: Yeah, but so what? He was already leaving at that point, I think.
TACKETT: You're absolutely right. But he still had months to serve. There's still a campaign to wage. If you look at who's influencing all the key Senate races, it's the Senate Leadership Fund, which is the political entity that he created.
INSKEEP: Did you feel ultimately that you did learn something that most people don't know about this very public figure from all your time with him?
TACKETT: Several things, I guess. One of them is that power can also be isolating. As he said to me more than once, I know all the Democrats hate me because of Garland. I know half the Republicans hate me because of Trump. He's seen by most people in monochrome, and I found him to have more dimensions than that. He's actually somewhat emotional, believe it or not. He tears up pretty easily when he's talking about his parents, particularly his mother, who was absolutely the most important influence in his life. He has a sense of humor, which might surprise some people. And he's a rational actor, and by that I mean he just makes kind of a clinical cost-benefit analysis.
INSKEEP: Let me ask you directly about one of the most brutal criticisms that Democrats at least would make of Mitch McConnell, that he constantly put his party over his country. Does he see it that way?
TACKETT: He does not, and that doesn't mean his view is right, but he doesn't. And he would point probably to Ukraine as much as any single decision...
INSKEEP: Where he's been a leader in his party in insisting the United States should support Ukraine even though some Republicans have their doubts, to say the least.
TACKETT: Right. Yeah, there's no question about that. And he really negotiated that with President Biden, with enough Republicans. He brought enough Republicans along. He spent political capital to make that happen. One of the other things he tried to use his power for and didn't succeed was the immigration bill. And that was an interesting study in political calculation because...
INSKEEP: We're talking about the one that failed earlier this year...
TACKETT: Right.
INSKEEP: ...That would've added border security measures and so forth. Go on.
TACKETT: So he talked to President Biden. And he said, look, you have a problem with immigration, so you need to do something. And we want to do something. He got James Lankford, one of the most conservative members of the Senate, to lead the charge for the Republicans knowing that he had good relations with House Republicans. His argument to the Republicans was you're never going to get a stronger immigration deal. And so he really had the table set to actually accomplish something on immigration until Donald Trump came in and scotched the deal by telling Republican senators not to take it.
INSKEEP: But it was then McConnell who said, listen, for political reasons, we all have to pretend to change our minds.
TACKETT: Yeah, and that's, you know, the inside story of the inside game of politics is not clean. It's not tidy, and in some senses, you know, it's not inspiring.
INSKEEP: Michael Tackett, thanks for coming by. It's a pleasure to meet you.
TACKETT: Oh, thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: His book is called "The Price Of Power."
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