When I served as counselor of the State Department, I advised the secretary of state about America’s wars with Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and al-Qaeda. I spent a good deal of time visiting battlefields in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as shaping strategy in Washington. But when I left government service in 2009, I eagerly resumed work on a book that dealt with America’s most durable, and in many ways most effective and important, enemy: Canada.

So I feel both morally compelled and professionally qualified to examine the Trump administration’s interesting but far from original idea of absorbing that country into the union.

There are, as Donald Trump and Don Corleone might put it, two ways of doing this: the easy way and the hard way. The easy way would be if Canadians rose up en masse clamoring to join the United States. Even so, there would be awkwardness.

[Read: The angry Canadian]

Canada is slightly larger than America. That would mean that the “cherished 51st state,” as Trump calls it, would be lopsided in terms of territory. It would be 23 times larger than California, which would be fine for owning the libs, but it would also be 14 times larger than the Lone Star State, which would definitely cause some pursed lips and steely looks there. Messing with Texas is a bad idea.

The new state would be the largest in population too, with 40 million people—more than California by a hair, and considerably more than Texas, Florida, or New York. Its size would pose a whole bunch of problems for Trump: Canada is a much more left-wing country than the United States, and absorbing it could well revive the political fortunes of progressives. If its 10 provinces became 10 states instead of one, only three would probably vote for the GOP; the other seven would likely go for Democrats. That might mean adding six Republican senators and 14 Democrats. If Trump were impeached a third time, that might produce the supermajority required for conviction in the Senate.

But such political ramifications are purely academic considerations at the moment. Polling suggests that 85 to 90 percent of all Canadians cling to sovereignty. Having been denied the easy way of absorbing Canada, therefore, the United States might have to try the hard way, conquering the country and administering it as a territory until it is purged of Liberals, Conservatives, and whatever the Canadian equivalent of RINOs turns out to be.

Unfortunately, we have tried this before, with dismal results. In 1775, before the United States had even formally declared independence from Great Britain, it launched an invasion of Canada, hoping to make it the 14th colony. The psychological-warfare geniuses in Congress ordered that the local farmers and villagers be distributed pamphlets—translated into French—declaring, “You have been conquered into liberty,” an interesting way of putting it. Unfortunately, the Catholic farmers and villagers were largely illiterate, and their leaders, the gentry and parish priests who could read, were solidly on the side of the British against a bunch of invading Protestants.

There were moments of brilliant leadership in this invasion, particularly in a daring autumn march through Maine to the very walls of Quebec. There was also a great deal of poltroonery and bungling. The Americans had three talented generals. The first, Richard Montgomery, got killed in the opening assault on Quebec. The second, John Thomas, died of smallpox, along with many of his men. Inoculation was possible, but, like today’s vaccine skeptics, many thought it a bad idea. You can visit the capacious cemetery for the victims on Île aux Noix, now Fort Lennox, Canada.

The third general, the most talented of the lot, was Benedict Arnold, who held the expedition together even after suffering a grievous leg wound. Eventually, however, he grew disgusted with a Congress rather less craven and incompetent than its contemporary successor and became a traitor, accepting a commission as a brigadier general in the British army and fighting against American forces.

We tried again in 1812. Thomas Jefferson, the original Republican, described the acquisition of Canada as “a mere matter of marching.” This was incorrect. The United States launched eight or nine invasions of Canada during the War of 1812, winning only one fruitless battle. The rest of the time, it got walloped. For example, General William Hull, like other American commanders a superannuated veteran of the Revolution, ended up surrendering Detroit with 2,500 troops to a much smaller British and Indian force. Court-martialed for cowardice and neglect of duty in 1814, he was sentenced to death but pardoned.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is perhaps unfamiliar with the Battle of Chateaugay. The last three letters are, after all, gay, and as such, the battle has doubtless been expunged from Defense Department websites and databases, meeting the same fate as the Enola Gay. Still, it is instructive. An invading force of 2,600 American regulars encountered about 1,500 Canadian militia members, volunteers, and Mohawks under a Francophone colonel, Charles de Salaberry.  They were defeated and had to withdraw.

Since the War of 1812, Americans have not tried any formal invasions of Canada, but there was tacit and sometimes overt support for the 1837–38 revolt of the Canadian patriotes, a confrontation over Oregon (a sober look at the size of the Royal Navy dissuaded us from trying anything), and the Fenian raids of 1866 and 1870. The Fenians were rather like the Proud Boys, only better organized and all Irish, and they also ended up fleeing back over the border.

Perhaps today’s Canadians are a flimsier lot. The Canadian armed forces are quite small (the army numbers only about 42,000, including reservists), although spirited and hardy. One should note with respect that 158 Canadians were killed fighting alongside American soldiers in Afghanistan. But even if the Canadian military were overcome after some initial bloody battles, what then?

Canadians may have gone in for wokeness in recent years, it is true, but there is the matter of their bloody-minded DNA. It was not that long ago that they harvested baby seals—the ones with the big, sad, adorable brown eyes—with short iron clubs. They love hockey, a sport that would have pleased the emperors and blood-crazed plebeians and patricians of ancient Rome if they could only have figured out how to build an ice rink in the Colosseum.

[Read: Canada is taking Trump seriously and personally]

Parenthetically, there remains the problem of the First Nations (as the Canadians refer to them), whom they treated somewhat less badly than Americans treated Native Americans (as we refer to them). There are about 50,000 Mohawks straddling the U.S.-Canadian border, and they are fearless, which is why you will find them building skyscrapers at terrifying heights above the street. As members of what used to be the Iroquois Confederacy, they were ferocious warriors, and they retain a martial tradition. It is sobering to consider that they may think, with reason, that we are the illegal immigrants who have ruined the country, and therefore hold a grudge.

There is a martial spirit up north waiting to be reawakened. Members of the Trump administration may not have heard of Vimy Ridge, Dieppe, the crossing of the Sangro, Juno Beach, or the Battle of the Scheldt. Take it from a military historian: The Canadian soldiers were formidable, as were the sailors who escorted convoys across the North Atlantic and the airmen who flew in the Battle of Britain and the air war over Germany. Canada’s 44,000 dead represented a higher percentage of the population than America’s losses in the Second World War. Those who served were almost entirely volunteers.

Bottom line: It is not a good idea to invade Canada. I recommend that in order to avoid the Trump administration becoming even more of a laughingstock, Secretary Hegseth find, read, and distribute to the White House a good account of the Battle of Chateau***. It could help avoid embarrassment.

I loved the 1980s, when I was a college student, and I especially loved the music. Lately, I’ve been thinking of a classic ’80s anti-war song by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, a British new-wave band, whose lyrics were an angry ode to the airplane that dropped the first nuclear weapon on Japan:

Enola Gay

It shouldn’t ever have to end this way

Enola Gay

It shouldn’t fade in our dreams away

The Enola Gay was named for the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. It will not fade away: The plane and its mission will always have an important place in military history. But people working in the United States Department of Defense might have a harder time finding a reference to it on any military website, because of an archival sweep of newly forbidden materials at the Pentagon.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered a massive review of DOD computer archives in an attempt to “align” the department with President Donald Trump’s directive to eliminate anything on government systems that could be related to DEI. At the Defense Department, this seems to mean scrubbing away any posts or images on military servers that might highlight the contributions of minorities, including gay service members. So far, according to the Associated Press, some 26,000 images have been flagged for deletion, including a photo of the Enola Gay, because … well, gay.

Of course, tagging for deletion images such as those of the Enola Gay is likely a mistake made by someone who plugged in gay as a keyword for a global find-and-mark command. The military, like other organizations, loves metrics, and the people in charge of executing the anti-DEI push almost certainly want to be able to show some sort of measurable progress on “eliminating DEI.”

But why not just focus on the president’s order to cancel current spending on such programs? As a former DOD employee, I had to sit through some DEI events, and in my view, they were not a great use of government time. I did not need a professor from a local college to come in and explain what cis means. (My first thought during that presentation was: How much are we paying for this?)

Hegseth and the Pentagon, however, don’t seem particularly focused on pruning all wasteful spending, because they’re actually spending money and investing hours of federal-worker time to indulge in a kind of gay panic in the DOD archives. This effort is part of a larger memory-holing exercise that includes not only getting rid of references to sexual minorities, but also eradicating racial and ethnic “firsts.” As the AP reported: “The vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women and minorities, including notable milestones made in the military. And it also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months—such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women.”

It’s humorous to think that the Enola Gay got caught in a roundup of ostensibly pro-LGBTQ materials, but the whole business raises the question of the purpose behind deleting tens of thousands of images. There is something fundamentally weird about interpreting an order to get rid of DEI programs as a charge to erase pages of American history. What are the lethal warfighters of the Pentagon so afraid of?

The most likely answer is that they’re afraid of Trump, but the larger problem is that the MAGA movement—including its supporters in the military and the Defense Department—is based on fear and insecurity, a sense that American culture is hostile to them and that Trump is the protector of a minority under siege. Many members of this movement believe that the “left,” or whatever remains of it now, is engaged in a war on the traditional family, on masculinity, on American capitalism, on Christmas and Christians. They see DEI as one of the many spiritual and moral pathogens that threaten to infect fine young men and women (especially white ones) and turn them into sexually decadent Marxists.

They also seem to believe that the way to stop this is to engage in rewriting history so that impressionable young Americans don’t accidentally encounter positive images of Black or female or gay service members. After all, there’s no telling where that leads.

This trepidation reflects a lack of faith in their own children and their fellow citizens, and it is produced in the same bubble of isolation and suspicion that makes parents fearful of letting children move away, especially to go to college. Anxious parents in small towns might not know better, but an immense—and diverse—military organization of 3 million service members and civilians surely does. In the end, however, it doesn’t matter whether anyone in the DOD agrees or disagrees with this silly crusade: Orders are orders.

In 1953, when Stalin died, the other members of the Soviet leadership soon closed ranks against the chief of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, a vicious monster of a man who kept tabs on all of them. They put him on trial, shot him in a Moscow bunker, and did not speak of him in public again. After his execution, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were sent an article on the Bering Strait, with instructions to remove the entry on Beria and replace it with the new entry on the Arctic waterway. Many Soviet citizens did as they were told.

Today, no one needs to engage in such complicated methods. If Hegseth’s commissars want to replace the history of the Tuskegee Airmen with an article about the soil and weather in Tuskegee, Alabama, a functionary at the Pentagon can do it with a keystroke, while zapping away references to gays, to minorities, to women—perhaps with the hope that one day, no one will even remember what’s been lost.

President Donald Trump’s shift on the Department of Government Efficiency began with a warning from an unlikely source.

Jesse Watters, a co-host of the Fox News hit show The Five, is usually a slick deliverer of MAGA talking points. But on February 19, Watters told a surprisingly emotional story about a friend working at the Pentagon who was poised to lose his job as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce. “I finally found one person I knew who got DOGE’d, and it hit me in the heart,” said Watters, who urged his Fox colleagues to “be a little bit less callous.”

Although Watters soon resumed championing DOGE, the moment went viral. Trump watched the clip and asked advisers if it was resonating with his base of supporters, according to one of three White House officials I spoke with for this story (they requested anonymity so they could discuss private conversations).

Over the ensuing weeks, the president grew unhappy with the television coverage of cuts affecting his voters, according to two of those officials, while the White House fielded calls from Cabinet members and Republican lawmakers frustrated by Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul empowered to slash the federal government. Some of Trump’s top advisers became worried about the political fallout from DOGE’s sweeping cuts, especially after seeing scenes of angry constituents yelling at GOP members of Congress in town halls.

[Read: Hungary joins the DOGE efforts]

All of this culminated in Trump taking his first steps to rein in Musk’s powers yesterday. The president called a closed-door meeting with Cabinet members and Musk, one that devolved into sharp exchanges between the DOGE head and several agency leaders. Afterward, Trump declared that his Cabinet would now “go first” in deciding whom in their departments to keep or fire.

DOGE lives. Trump has made clear that Musk still wields significant authority. And those close to Trump say that the president is still enamored with the idea of employing the world’s richest man, and still largely approves of the work that DOGE is doing to gut the federal bureaucracy. Some in the White House also believe that clarifying Musk’s purview might help the administration in a series of lawsuits alleging that Musk is illegally empowered.

But Trump’s first public effort to put a leash on Musk appears to mark the end of DOGE’s opening chapter, and a potential early turning point in Trump’s new administration.

Many in the GOP have reveled in the brash way that Musk and his young team of engineers have strode into government agencies, seized the computers, and slashed jobs and budgets. And few Republicans have been willing to publicly challenge Musk, who has taken on hero status with many on the right and wields an unfathomable fortune with which he can punish his political foes. But important figures within the president’s orbit—including some senior staffers and outside advisers—now quietly hope that the cuts, as Trump himself posted on social media yesterday, will be done with a “‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’”

“I don’t want to see a big cut where a lot of good people are cut,” Trump said to reporters in the Oval Office after yesterday’s meeting. But, he added, “Elon and the group are going to be watching them, and if they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”

Six weeks into Trump’s term, the White House has declined to say how many people have left the federal government so far, or how many more it wants to see fired as it looks to reshape the government’s civil service of 2.3 million workers. Democrats, shaking off their despondency after November’s elections, have rallied against Musk, trying to save agencies such as USAID and warning that all Americans, no matter their political party, would feel the impact of DOGE cuts to agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, the IRS, and the Department of Agriculture. Musk paid them no heed, trashing Democrats’ objections to his more than 219 million followers on X and wielding an actual chain saw onstage at a conservative conference last month. Days later, he directed that an email be sent to the entire federal workforce asking workers to justify their employment by listing their accomplishments of the past week.

That was the breaking point for several Cabinet members. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and FBI Director Kash Patel were among the officials who voiced complaints to their staff and to the White House that Musk was usurping their authority, one of the White House officials told me. Their agencies, along with many others, instructed employees not to reply to Musk’s email, and the government’s main personnel agency later said that responding was voluntary, neutering DOGE’s threats. Trump’s Cabinet officials broadly agree with DOGE’s mission—to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in government—but object to the seemingly haphazard way it is being executed.

[Juliette Kayyem: Is DOGE sure it wants to fire these people?]

That pushback from inside the administration was combined with rising public anger about the cuts that exploded at several lawmakers’ town halls in recent weeks. From Georgia to Kansas, Republicans took sharp criticism about the cuts, including from some in the crowds who described themselves as Trump voters and veterans. The National Republican Congressional Committee told lawmakers this week to postpone holding any further town halls. The anger reverberated to Capitol Hill this week, with several Republicans privately urging DOGE to slow down.

Majority Leader John Thune said on CNN on Tuesday that Cabinet secretaries should retain the full power to hire and fire, a belief he later reiterated privately to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, according to one of the White House officials who was briefed on the call. This person told me that in recent weeks, Wiles has also relayed to Trump other GOP lawmakers’ concerns about Musk, including that the constant drip of stories about DOGE slashing key jobs is distracting from their political messaging on issues such as immigration and taxes.

Musk was invited to a Senate lunch on Wednesday, a meal that took place just hours after the Supreme Court delivered a significant blow to the Trump administration in one of several ongoing legal fights over spending cuts. In the meeting, lawmakers later told reporters, several senators urged Musk to better coordinate with Congress by giving them more visibility into his process. They also offered to make the cuts permanent by enshrining them in legislation.

Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters afterward that the “the system needs to be fine-tuned to coordinate between DOGE and Congress and the administration,” and that Musk needs to be better about addressing senators’ concerns. Musk, in the lunch, distanced himself from some of the more unpopular firings. Hours later, he had a similar meeting with House Republicans, some of whom voiced unhappiness with that day’s news reports about plans to fire 80,000 Veterans Affairs workers, thousands of whom are veterans themselves, in a move that would likely delay vital services to those who have served the country in uniform.

Trump also grew angry at those reports, snapping at aides that he did not want to be seen as someone who betrayed veterans, many of whom he believes voted for him, an outside adviser who spoke with the president told me. That, when combined with the complaints from his advisers and worries that Musk was beginning to drag down his own poll numbers, prompted him to call for the meeting with the DOGE leader and the Cabinet heads at the White House yesterday.

The meeting soon grew volatile, according to an official present, with Rubio snapping back at Musk when the billionaire accused him of not moving fast enough with his firings. Musk and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also clashed over the quality of air-traffic controllers, while Doug Collins, who runs the Department of Veterans Affairs, urged that any layoffs be done more carefully. Trump agreed. Details of the meeting were first reported today by The New York Times. In addition to announcing that the Cabinet secretaries would be in charge of firings, Trump said that similar meetings would be held every two weeks.

“Everyone is working as one team to help President Trump deliver on his promise to make our government more efficient,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement when I asked if Musk’s role is shrinking.

Tammy Bruce, a spokesperson for the State Department, said in a statement: “Secretary Rubio considered the meeting an open and productive discussion with a dynamic team that is united in achieving the same goal: making America great again.” The Departments of Defense and Transportation, the FBI, and the VA, as well as DOGE, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Musk later wrote on X that the meeting was “very productive.” Yet for some in MAGA’s populist wing, the moment was perceived as a humiliation for the billionaire. They rallied around efforts to protect the Pentagon and the authority of Hegseth, a popular figure on the right. A cartoon of Trump walking Musk like a dog on a leash was passed around on the Hill and in right-wing-media circles. Some predicted that Trump would soon jettison his billionaire completely.

[Read: The Trump voters who are losing patience]

The White House insists that Musk’s work will continue. The Office of Personnel Management outlined plans this week for a new wave of firings, offering guidance to cut entire teams and job categories. Most of those fired so far have been probationary employees, who are typically new hires with fewer job protections.

Democrats, who see Musk as a potent political target for their party, have downplayed the significance of Musk’s seeming demotion.

“I don’t think anything has fundamentally changed.” Representative Adam Smith, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, told me. “It’s not about government efficiency and effectiveness. It’s about crippling the federal workforce because he sees it as a threat to him instead of a service provider to the country.”

In an effort to ward off other court challenges, the administration has also tried to stress that Musk, who is a special government employee, is not technically running the U.S. DOGE Service; instead, the White House said last month, DOGE is administered by Amy Gleason, a former health-care executive who worked for the agency in a previous iteration.

The claim was undermined, however, by Trump’s own words: When he spoke before Congress on Tuesday night, he repeatedly referred to Musk as the head of DOGE.

“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.”