According to this big NY Times tik-tok of the Trump post-election strategy, he just put his faith in the wrong people:
The senator was also under a false impression that the president was only blustering, the officials said. Mr. McConnell had had multiple conversations with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the senator’s top political adviser, Josh Holmes, had spoken with Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Both West Wing officials had conveyed the same message: They would pursue all potential avenues but recognized that they might come up short. Mr. Trump would eventually bow to reality and accept defeat.
Please. Trump didn’t accept the results in 2016 when he won! He convened a “voter Fraud Commission” to prove that the popular vote had been stolen from him. Anyone who thought he would ever concede was a naive fool. And say what you will about Mitch McConnell, he is not that.
Jonathan Chait shows just how ridiculous it is:
His incentives clearly ran toward humoring Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election and downplaying the damage it would cause. As Robert Costa reported on November 9, McConnell’s calculus was driven entirely by his desire to win the Georgia special elections. McConnell believed “the base must be stoked,” which meant supporting Trump’s lies. McConnell’s posture at the time was that Trump was merely doing to Democrats what they had done to him: “Let’s not have any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election.” (In fact, Hillary Clinton conceded her defeat the morning after the vote.)
The Times does note that McConnell’s thinking about Trump’s autogolpe changed less because of any principled revulsion than because it became a liability rather than an asset in the Senate contest: “Perhaps most important in Mr. McConnell’s evolving calculus, internal polls were showing that the Republicans’ strongest argument in the Georgia runoffs was that a Republican-led Senate would be a necessary check on a new — and inevitable — Democratic administration.”
Everything in Trump’s history made it obvious he would provoke a crisis if defeated. McConnell chose to cooperate with Trump’s attack on the republic for the same reason he spent the previous four years cooperating with Trump: because it enhanced his own power.
McConnell has always fashioned himself the canniest man in Washington. His desire to broadcast his own savvy has frequently led him to counterproductively blurt out of his own cynicism. (McConnell has famously admitted that his goals under Obama were to deny the president bipartisan cover and make him a one-term president, quotes that Democrats later threw back in his face.) He simply cannot suppress his instinct to let everybody know how shrewdly he plays the game.
McConnell is now casting himself as a dupe because it is the only escape. He has been implicated in a historic crime.
McConnell played out the string until January 5th when he lost the Senate. Now, he’s running around trying to cover his tracks. The Grim Reaper knew exactly what he was doing.