WASHINGTON — As the longest-serving Senate leader in history, Republican Mitch McConnell had a reputation for keeping his rank-and-file members in line and frustrating Democrats by relentlessly using procedural tactics to block their agenda.
Now out of leadership and wrapping up what is likely his last term in office, the 82-year-old Kentucky senator is free from the constraints of leadership and the prospect of facing voters again. He's now voted against three of President Donald Trump's high-profile nominees and publicly criticized the tariffs at the center of his economic agenda.
At the same time, McConnell, physically bound to a wheelchair in recent days after suffering a fall, has lost much of his influence on a Senate Republican conference that he once managed with an iron grip as he's grown further out of step with the MAGA movement driving the party.
McConnell, though, seems unperturbed by going it alone, bucking his own former deputies who now run the Senate — and the party he used to loyally put first.
“Sen. McConnell has made very clear that, now that he is no longer the majority leader, now that he is Mitch McConnell, senator from Kentucky, he doesn’t have the burdens of leadership,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who, like McConnell, has sometimes clashed with Trump. “And so he is doing what he feels is best, and I’m happy for him.”
Or, as one former McConnell aide put it: “I think we’ve reached peak YOLO McConnell.”
Last month, McConnell was one of three Republicans who opposed the confirmation of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, saying in a blistering statement that Trump’s controversial pick didn't demonstrate he was up for the job.
On Wednesday, McConnell was the sole Republican to vote against Tulsi Gabbard to be Trump’s director of national intelligence, warning she has a "history of alarming lapses in judgment.” And on Thursday, McConnell, a childhood polio survivor, also was the only Republican to vote no on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, to be health and human services secretary.
“In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world," McConnell said in a statement after the vote. "I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles."
In each case, McConnell kept his cards close to the vest. While he had made public statements expressing concerns about the picks, he didn't say how he would vote beforehand. Plus, he supported procedural votes to advance all three nominees, heightening the drama on the final confirmation votes.
One Republican senator told NBC News that McConnell had not been trying to lobby colleagues to join him in opposition to the trio of Trump nominees.
Still, the votes only added another chapter to the long-running saga between the two Republican figures. In the past, McConnell has been critical of Trump at times, but also endorsed his past three presidential bids.
Asked about McConnell’s vote against Kennedy on Thursday, Trump said the former Senate leader had “lost his power.”
“I feel sorry for Mitch,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “If I didn’t come along, the Republican Party wouldn’t exist.”
Trump even expressed doubt that McConnell ever had polio. “I have no idea if he had polio,” Trump said.
The string of votes against Trump's nominees prompted McConnell's Kentucky colleague, conservative Sen. Rand Paul, to take a swipe at the former GOP leader with whom he's often had a frosty relationship.
"People are very unhappy in Kentucky with those votes," Paul said of McConnell. "One conjecture is that he voted with the party more because he felt like he had to be part of the team. Now, he's free to vote the way he truly believes."
Later in the day, Murkowski continued to defend McConnell, saying that as GOP leader he had taken plenty of arrows for rank-and-file members for years.
"I have extraordinary respect for the man and his leadership," Murkowski, who along with fellow moderate Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, voted with McConnell against Hegseth. "He has taken the criticism ... when he was leader. He says, 'Let me be the bad guy.' He took a lot of heat for a lot of us for a long time, and I'm not afraid to stand up for Mitch McConnell."
First elected in 1984, McConnell's seventh term ends at the end of 2026, when he is widely expected by colleagues to retire. Democrats say that explains why he's more willing than other Republicans to buck Trump.
"He's in a unique position that he's not afraid," said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. "The only way to explain some of the votes of his colleagues for some of these unqualified folks is that they're afraid. Mitch McConnell is not afraid."
Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., the former chair of Senate Republicans' campaign arm who worked with McConnell to capture the majority last fall, sidestepped a question about whether he was surprised by the votes.
"I strongly support these nominees. And I respect other senators and the positions they will take," Daines said. "And I'm just grateful that we got them all through with very strong Republican votes."
The willingness to vote against his party reveals a different side of the Kentucky senator. While Leader McConnell built his power by understanding and reflecting the wishes of his conference, Senator McConnell has a different set of instincts that often clash with the MAGA turn that his party has taken.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a onetime Trump political rival who is now an ally, declined to prognosticate about why McConnell was voting down top Trump nominees. But Cruz noted that Trump and McConnell have a long, complicated history.
In 2017, during his first term, Trump extended an olive branch to McConnell, then the powerful majority leader, by naming his wife, Elaine Chao, as his transportation secretary. But after McConnell condemned Trump's push to overturn the 2020 election and his involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Trump lashed out with racist attacks against Chao and said McConnell had a “death wish” for backing “Democrat sponsored bills."
Apart from tariffs, which Trump has presented as a centerpiece of his second-term agenda, the two have also clashed over aid for Ukraine: Trump threatened to cut funding for the key U.S. ally, and McConnell, who favors U.S. involvement to shape world affairs, argued that supporting Kiev was needed to halt Russian aggression.
“It’s not a mystery there's no love lost" between McConnell and Trump, Cruz said.
