“I’m avoiding getting too high on the good days and too low on the bad days,” Mitch McConnell was telling me.

“Is today a good day or a bad day?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” was all McConnell said, chuckling.

It was late Tuesday afternoon, a few hours before President Donald Trump was scheduled to arrive at the Capitol to address Congress. Earlier that day, the White House had imposed 25 percent tariffs on all imports from Canada and Mexico and a new 10 percent tariff on all imports from China. The stock market was cratering. Trump seemed to be systematically dismantling the federal government and methodically abandoning Ukraine and freaking out scores of leaders and citizens from Kyiv to Panama City to Ottawa to Nuuk to, perhaps most of all, Washington. And McConnell was sitting in his Senate office, wondering what fresh horrors Trump had in store for the evening.

Or at least that’s what I imagined McConnell was wondering. He’s not one to offer up much confirmation about what he’s wondering.

It seemed like a logical assumption, given the outlying position the senator from Kentucky occupies in today’s GOP. Few Washington species are more isolated these days than elected Republicans who despise Trump and are very much despised back by Trump. Not to mention a lame-duck Republican—until recently one of the most powerful figures in his party—who has been a steadfast advocate for free-trade policies and has vowed to devote his remaining time in office to national security, specifically fighting for the causes of Ukraine and NATO and against Russia.

The night before, Trump had announced a halt to all aid to Ukraine. A few days earlier, he and Vice President J. D. Vance had engaged in a televised ruckus with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Virtually no Senate Republicans had raised objections to any of this, with a few exceptions.

[Read: Putin is loving this]

McConnell had not yet weighed in, either. And I felt fortunate to be granted an audience, considering how rarely he gives interviews. I have been writing about politics in Washington for more than two decades and had never spoken to him, although I’ve tried many times in various Capitol corridors. “For the last couple of decades, I’ve spent my time smiling and walking on by,” McConnell told me, summarizing his general approach to hallway press relations. Occasionally, McConnell might blurt out a “Good try” in response to a shouted question, but only if he’s feeling expansive.

I was also eager to speak with him because many people around McConnell have described him as feeling “liberated” now that he has stepped down as head of the Senate Republican Conference after 18 years. This sense of newfound freedom seemed like it would be even greater after McConnell announced on February 20—his 83rd birthday—that he would not run for an eighth term in the Senate in 2026. I wasn’t expecting McConnell to start wearing shorts and a hoodie around the Capitol like his Democratic colleague Senator John Fetterman, but I was curious to ask the former leader what being “liberated” means for him, especially in light of recent events.

“Well, an example is the Washington Post op-ed today,” McConnell told me. He had just published an article about how a government shutdown could be costly to defense spending in the long run: “Extending the 2024 budget through the end of FY2025 would mean the Defense Department would lack the funds to make payroll for 2 million service members,” McConnell wrote. “Especially after accounting for the additional 10 percent junior enlisted pay raise authorized last year.”

The op-ed was not riveting. But I mention it because McConnell did—three times—as an example of his current state of liberation.

I asked McConnell what he thought about that Trump-Vance-Zelensky scene in the Oval Office last week. “Here is the way I look at this whole episode,” McConnell told me. “What we need to avoid at the end is a headline that says ‘Russia Won, America Lost.’”

A sphinxlike response. Or perhaps a nonresponse.

“With this particular president, we know we’re going to have a lot of drama along the way,” McConnell continued. “The really important thing is, how does it end?”

I took another crack at getting his reaction to the Oval Office episode. Trump had actually paused U.S. funding to Ukraine—a massively tangible action, much more than just drama. I also mentioned that a few of his Republican colleagues—most pointedly, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—had been critical of Trump’s recent posture on Ukraine and Russia. Did he have any reaction to the past few days?

“Well, at risk of repeating myself,” McConnell said, before repeating himself: “I’m trying not to overreact to every moment of drama that went on.” When I pressed him on Trump’s funding pause, McConnell said he hoped it would be “just a temporary thing.”

How did McConnell think things were going generally in these first months of the second Trump administration? “Better than expected?” I asked. “Worse than expected?”

“Well, I’ve already answered that twice.”

I tried a different tack. Many people around Washington, of both parties, sound quite concerned about what appears to be happening in the second Trump administration so far. What was his level of concern or despair or whatever the word is?

“I’m not going to answer that,” McConnell replied.

“Okay.”

“You’ll get the answer to it in pieces.”

“How should we look?” I asked.

“Well, I mean, take the Washington Post editorial today …”

The afternoon I met with him, McConnell told me he didn’t know whether he would attend Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday evening. “I’m sure gonna listen to every word,” he said of the speech. “It doesn’t make any difference whether I’m physically present.” He wound up watching from home.

The senator’s health appears to be in some decline. Over the past few years, he has suffered a number of distressing public freeze-ups and falls. McConnell is currently using a wheelchair; his staff has in some cases attributed his recent infirmities to the lingering effects of childhood polio. His face is gaunt, his voice pinched and his words at times hard to decipher. He has suffered hearing loss.

When spotted around the Senate these days, McConnell cuts a delicate figure. He is also a delicate topic among his Republican colleagues.

[Read: Mitch McConnell’s worst political miscalculation]

Most of them once granted McConnell their unambiguous allegiance. He was first elected to head the Senate Republican Conference in 2007 and went on to become the longest-tenured party leader in the history of the chamber. But Trump’s continued dominance of the GOP has made it impossible for McConnell to serve in any meaningful leadership role these days.

The mutual loathing between the two men has been richly catalogued. A quick sampler: Trump has called McConnell “dour, sullen, and unsmiling”; a “broken down hack politician”; and a “disaster,” among other things. (He also referred to McConnell’s Taipei-born spouse, the former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, as McConnell’s “China loving wife, Coco Chow.”)

In turn, McConnell has described Trump as a “despicable human being,” “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” and someone who “has every characteristic you would not want a president to have.” In a 60 Minutes interview last month, host Lesley Stahl read McConnell some other choice brickbats McConnell had reserved for Trump (“nasty,” “sleazeball,” “not very smart”), which the senator hilariously tried to downplay as “private comments.”

“Well, they’re in your biography,” Stahl pointed out, referring to a recent volume by the longtime Washington journalist Mike Tackett, who drew on about 50 hours of on-the-record interviews with his subject, as well as exclusive access to a series of private oral histories that McConnell had recorded.

“Yeah,” McConnell acknowledged, not disputing any of the descriptions.

It did not matter that McConnell was instrumental in helping Trump achieve his 2017 tax overhaul and his appointment of three justices to the Supreme Court. Or that McConnell, despite saying that Trump’s conduct on January 6 showed him to be unfit for office, voted to acquit the outgoing president after he was impeached a second time. Or that McConnell, in his leadership role, remained a fierce partisan and steadfast in his support for Republican candidates, including Trump, whom he supported again after he became the Republican nominee in 2024.

The tumultuous political alliance between McConnell and Trump clearly could not be salvaged, let alone repeated. McConnell announced early last year—several months before the November election—that he would step down as Republican leader at the start of the current Congress in January.

Since Trump’s reelection, McConnell has come to occupy an uncharacteristic role inside his caucus: The old horse has turned into something of a maverick. His foreign-policy views in support of strong, Reagan-style engagement abroad—especially against authoritarian regimes—run counter to the Trump-styple isolationism that dominates much of today’s GOP. “I picked this issue because it’s the most important thing,” he told me of his focus on national security. “Because we’re talking about world peace here.”

He added that Russia’s “horrible invasion” of Ukraine has had a unifying effect on the world’s democracies. “If you look at who’s on the other side—North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, and Iran’s proxies—I don’t think it’s hard to figure out who the good guys are,” McConnell told me. Yes, I said, although the more pertinent question seemed to be whose side a Donald Trump–led America was on. Did he worry that things might be moving in the wrong direction?

“That’s the doomsday scenario, right?” McConnell said. “I tend to come down on the optimistic side.” He did not say why, other than to reiterate that “there is a lot of drama” and “in the end, it depends on how it works out.”

Freed from the constraints that leadership imposed on him, McConnell did vote against more of Trump’s Cabinet nominees—Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—than any other Senate Republican. Would he have taken the Hegseth, Kennedy, and Gabbard votes if he were still leader? “Probably not,” McConnell told me.

[Read: The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine]

“When he says that he feels liberated, he is no longer responsible for advancing the administration’s priorities or a strictly Republican agenda,” Senator Susan Collins, the moderate Republican of Maine, told me. Collins, who counts herself as a strong McConnell ally, said that the majority of her caucus respects the former leader, even if it doesn’t always seem that way. “There are a handful of Republican senators who are polite in our conference meetings that trash him online or on television or podcasts,” Collins said, adding that this is “a real problem.” To praise McConnell too fulsomely in public runs the risk of annoying Trump, who tends to see even the most tepid praise of an enemy as disloyal.

In the days after McConnell announced that he would not seek reelection, I surveyed a handful of other Republican senators about his awkward position inside the caucus that he had led for so long. Their responses comprised a hodgepodge of restrained respect, resigned pity, and laughable obfuscation.

“Look, I respect the leader, I do, as I said in a tweet that got all kinds of retweets,” Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who has shown more-than-occasional disrespect for McConnell over the years, told me. As he waited for an elevator just off the Senate floor last week, Johnson noted that McConnell “absolutely reveres and respects” the institution of the Senate. “It’s sad that he’s had these falls. There’s nothing good about getting old,” he added.

A few minutes later, I encountered the Trump loyalist Josh Hawley of Missouri. Hawley, who had called for McConnell’s ouster long before he stepped down as leader, seemed rather un-thrilled by my questions as I walked alongside him.

“Gosh, I don’t know. I don’t want to speak for him, or comment,” Hawley told me, when I asked what he thought these last days in the Senate have been like for McConnell, and what his legacy will be. “I don’t want to comment, or commentate.”

I asked Hawley whether he believed that McConnell has been an ally of Trump in the new administration. “He’s voted against a bunch of his nominees, but again, I can’t comment on what his viewpoint is,” he said.

What was Hawley’s own viewpoint on McConnell?

“Well, that’s a big question. In what sense?” he asked.

“As a colleague, as a senator, as a champion of the Republican Party of today,” I said.

“Oh, listen, I think he’s had a very long career. I think he’s served his state and his country with a tremendous sense of duty.”

Hawley did not comment—or commentate—beyond that.

“You realize I’ll be 84 when I leave here. I was 42 when I got here,” McConnell told me. “Half of my life I’ve spent here.”

This was McConnell becoming a bit more chatty, if not expressive, as our interview wound down. My visit to his office also yielded these Kentucky kernels:

He said he hasn’t talked to Trump since Trump’s first term ended. He did speak with Joe Biden recently. “Not in any great detail. He just gave me a ring,” McConnell told me. “We became friends years ago. And I ended up actually being the only Republican at Beau’s funeral.” He said his treatment in the media has gotten considerably better of late. “I’ve discovered how to improve your press,” McConnell told me. “Announce you’re leaving.”

After not quite half an hour, my time was up. McConnell’s time was not, he emphasized—any valedictions or obituaries for his career would be premature. “My story’s going to unfold over the next year and a half,” he said.

[Read: The Trump voters who are losing patience]

A minute earlier, I’d wondered aloud where the larger story was headed—whether the good guys or the bad guys would prevail, and which team America was on.

“I think between Ukraine and Russia, it’s not hard to figure out who the good guys are,” McConnell said.

“It’s unclear who Trump thinks the good guys are,” I replied, hoping to trigger some reaction. No such luck. “Not gonna touch that?” I said to fill the silence.

“Good try.”

In October 2020, Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, sent an email that maligned a colleague. A few days before, Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, had, with two others, put out a statement—the Great Barrington Declaration—calling for looser public-health restrictions in the face of the pandemic. In place of lockdowns, the statement contended, the nation could simply let infections spread among most of the population while the old and infirm remained in relative isolation. Collins, like many other scientists, thought this was a dangerous idea. Bhattacharya and his co-authors were “fringe epidemiologists” whose proposal needed a “quick and devastating” rebuttal, Collins wrote in an email that later came to light through a public-records request. Collins doubled down on this dismissal in a media interview a week later: “This is a fringe component of epidemiology,” he told The Washington Post. “This is not mainstream sncience.”

So where are these two now? Collins abruptly ended his 32-year career at NIH last week, while Bhattacharya is Donald Trump’s pick to take over the agency. The turnabout has created a pleasing narrative for those aggrieved at scientific governance. “It’s remarkable to see that you’re nominated to be the head of the very institution whose leaders persecuted you because of what you believed,” Jim Banks, a Republican senator from Indiana, said at Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing yesterday. For Bhattacharya, a man who has described himself as the victim of “a propaganda attack” perpetrated by the nation’s $48 billion biomedical-research establishment, Collins’s insult has become a badge of pride, even a leading qualification for employment in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The “fringe” is now in charge.

Last year, when Collins was asked by a House committee about his comments on the Great Barrington Declaration, he said he was alarmed that the proposal had so quickly made its way to his boss, Alex Azar, who was then the secretary of Health and Human Services. Now that role is filled by another figure from the fringe, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and presumably, outsider scholars such as Bhattacharya—a health economist and a nonpracticing physician with a predilection for contrary views—will have greater sway than ever. (Bhattacharya declined to be interviewed for this story. Collins did not respond to a request for comment.)

“Science, to succeed, needs free speech,” Bhattacharya told the committee during the hearing. “It needs an environment where there’s tolerance to dissent.” This has long been his message—and warning—to the scientific community. In Bhattacharya’s view, Collins helped coordinate an effort to discredit his and others’ calls for an alternative approach to the pandemic; Collins’s role at an institution that disperses billions of dollars in research funding gave him a frightening power to “cast out heretics,” as Bhattacharya put it in 2023, “just like the medieval Catholic Church did.”

Now he means to use the same authority to rectify that wrong. In his opening remarks yesterday, Bhattacharya vowed to “create an environment where scientists, including early-career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement respectfully.” What this means in practice isn’t yet clear, but The Wall Street Journal has reported that he might try to prioritize funding for universities that score high on to-be-determined measures of campus-wide “academic freedom.” In other words, Bhattacharya may attempt to use the agency’s billion-dollar leverage in reverse, to bully academics into being tolerant.

These aspirations match up with those of his allies who are riding into Washington as champions of the underheard in science. Last month, Kennedy promised in his first speech to his staff that he would foster debate and “convene representatives of all viewpoints” to study chronic disease. “Nothing is going to be off-limits,” he said. Marty Makary, the nominee for FDA commissioner, has talked about his experience of the “censorship complex” and bemoaned an atmosphere of “total intolerance” in public health. Consensus thinking is oppressive, these men suggest. Alternative ideas, whatever those might be, have intrinsic value.

[Read: Revenge of the COVID contrarians]

Surely we can all agree that groupthink is a drag. But a curious pattern is emerging among the fringe-ocrats who are coming into power. Their dissenting views, strewn across the outskirts of conventional belief, appear to be curling toward a new and fringe consensus of its own. On the subject of vaccines, for instance, there used to be some space between the positions of Kennedy, the nation’s leading figure casting doubt on the safety and benefits of inoculations, and Bhattacharya. Kennedy has made false claims about the dangers of the mRNA-based COVID shots. Bhattacharya, meanwhile, once called the same vaccines “a medical miracle—extremely valuable for protecting the vulnerable against severe COVID-19 disease.” (He even criticized Anthony Fauci for downplaying the benefits of COVID shots by continuing to wear a mask after being immunized.)

Bhattacharya has in the past been tolerant of others’ more outrageous claims about vaccines. But that neutrality has lately drifted into a gentle posture of acceptance, like a one-armed hug. Under questioning from senators, he said that he is convinced that there is no link between autism and the MMR vaccine (and that he fully supports vaccinating children against measles). But he also floated the idea that Kennedy’s goal of doing further research on the topic would be worthwhile just the same. Last July, despite his past enthusiasm for mRNA-based COVID-19 shots, Bhattacharya said that he was planning to sign on to a statement calling for their deauthorization, because they are “contributing to an alarming rise in disability and excess deaths.” Kennedy has petitioned for the same, on the same grounds. (There is, in fact, no meaningful evidence that the vaccines have caused a spate of excess deaths.) In a post on X, Bhattacharya explained that he’d been hesitant to take this step at first, because some groups might still benefit from the vaccines, but then he came to realize that pulling the vaccine will create the conditions necessary for testing whether it still has any value.

[Read: The inflated risk of vaccine-induced cardiac arrest]

On this and other issues, the dissenting voices have started to combine into a chorus. The lab-leak theory of COVID’s origin provides another case in point. In yesterday’s hearing, Bhattacharya described scientific experts’ early dismissal of the possibility that the coronavirus spread from a lab in Wuhan, China, as “a low point in the history of science.” That’s an overstatement, but the criticism is fair: Dissenting views were stifled and ignored. But here again, what started as mere endorsement of debate has evolved into a countervailing sense of certainty. Although there’s still plenty of reason to believe that the pandemic did, in fact, begin with the natural passage of the virus from an animal host, the most important details about the pandemic’s origin remain unknown. Yet the fringe is nearly settled on the alternative interpretation. Bhattacharya has said that the pandemic “likely” started in a lab (a position that has been endorsed, albeit with low or moderate confidence, by almost half of the government agencies that have looked into it). Makary called the theory “a no-brainer.” And RFK Jr. published a 600-page book, The Wuhan Cover-Up, in support of it.

Based on the Senate’s Republican majority and the precedent of Kennedy’s confirmation, Bhattacharya is almost certain to sail through his Senate vote, and in short order. His prospects of delivering on his mission, though, are hazier. Some of his positions are already being undermined by the Trump administration’s prior actions. According to a new report in Nature, the agency is terminating hundreds of active research grants that may be construed to have a focus on gender or diversity, among other topics. Some work may be permitted to continue as long as any “DEI language” has been stripped from associated documents. This is hardly the “culture of respect for free speech” that Bhattacharya promised yesterday. Other, basic workings of the NIH have been dismantled under the second Trump administration: Approximately 1,200 employees have been fired, grant reviews have been frozen, and policies have been declared that would squeeze research funding for the nation’s universities. Bhattacharya is about to take the levers of power, but those levers have been ripped from their housing, and the springs removed and sold as scrap.

[Read: Inside the collapse at the NIH]

When pressed on these developments yesterday, Bhattacharya kept returning to a single line: “I fully commit to making sure that all the scientists at the NIH, and the scientists that the NIH supports, have the resources they need.” Whether he’d have the authority or know-how to do so remains in doubt. “Dr. Bhattacharya doesn’t really understand how NIH works, and he doesn’t understand how decisions are made,” Harold Varmus, who ran the agency in the 1990s, told me shortly after the hearing ended. As for Bhattacharya’s goals of promoting free speech among scientists and nurturing cutting-edge ideas for research, Varmus said that the problem has been misdiagnosed: Whatever conservatism exists doesn’t really come from the top, he said, but from the grant-review committees and the scientists themselves. “It’s exasperating for me to see what is about to happen,” he told me, “because this guy should not be in my old office.”

For what it’s worth, Bhattacharya has also shared other ambitious plans. He aims, for instance, to make science more reliable by incorporating into NIH-funded research the dreary work of replicating findings. “Replication is the heart and soul of what truth is in science,” he said during the hearing. That might help solve a pressing problem in the sciences, but it would also be a very costly project, started at a time when research costs are being cut. Under current conditions, even just the basic job of running the NIH seems pretty stressful on its own. Bhattacharya has, by his account, experienced lots of stress in recent years due to the many efforts to discredit him. His confirmation may not bring him full relief.