Mitch McConnell knows the clock is ticking
Whatever the timetable looked like for Donald Trump’s ouster when the day started, Trump managed to speed it up rather significantly when he stood in front of the TV cameras on the White House lawn and demanded that China and Ukraine both help him rig the 2020 election in his favor, while threatening China with retaliation if it doesn’t help him.
Donald Trump is now begging, on some conscious or subconscious level, to be ousted. He just emphatically threw away the impeachment defense he’d spent the past ten days crafting, and now he won’t be able to get it back. He can no longer claim the whistleblower report is inaccurate. He just confessed. It’s the decisive touchdown that effectively ends the game, even though there’s still time on the clock.
This brings us to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He knows he can’t stop Donald Trump from going down, which is why he’s spent the past week declining to even try to defend Trump. Instead, McConnell has only periodically popped to distance himself from the whistleblower scandal, and to confirm that he’s not willing to stick his neck out by trying to simply not hold an impeachment trial in the Senate.
Mitch McConnell knows that with the rapidly shifting impeachment polls, there’s an inflection point on the horizon, after which he and his fellow Republican Senators will have to come out in favor of his ouster if they want any chance of keeping their own seats when they’re up for reelection. The clock is ticking. McConnell only has a certain amount of time left to try to save himself at Trump’s expense, and he knows it. Tick tock.
