At long last, a top Republican is distancing himself from Donald Trump.
Literally.
Mitch McConnell has been boasting to colleagues and to reporters in Kentucky that he knew better than to go to the Amy Coney Barrett superspreader event in the Rose Garden or set foot on that 18 acres of magical thinking known as the White House because he could see that the president and his team were courting danger. At 78, the wily Senate majority leader, a polio survivor, wasn’t taking any chances.
“I actually haven’t been to the White House since Aug. 6,” he said at a news conference back home, “because my impression was their approach to how to handle this was different than mine and what I insisted that we do in the Senate, which is to wear a mask and practice social distancing.”
McConnell did more than physically distance himself from Trump. He politically distanced himself as well, throwing cold water on the president’s whiplash-inducing reversal on a stimulus bill. After torpedoing negotiations in a tweet last week because he thought the Democrats wanted too much, the steroid-pumped president did a triple axle and tweeted to Congress to “Go Big!”