Mitch McConnell Is Trying to Cover Up Trump’s Big Lie By Telling His Own

In the aftermath of the January 6 attack, Mitch McConnell tore into Donald Trump, describing the former president as “practically and morally responsible” for the insurrection and calling him out for the “crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole” with which he inundated supporters. Despite condemning that Big Lie, however, McConnell has shown himself willing to reap its benefits. For the past year, he has capitalized on the doubts MAGA conspiracy theories have cast on Joe Biden’s legitimacy to block the president’s agenda—and, heading into midterm elections this November, he’ll try to use the voter suppression laws that grew out of Trump’s lies to take back the Congressional majority.

As Democrats redouble their efforts to pass voting rights legislation this month, they have tried to underscore the connection between Trump’s attempts to undermine the 2020 election and the disenfranchisement campaign Republicans have launched ahead of the next one. “Subversion and suppression are inextricably linked,” Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock told NPR’s All Things Considered last week. McConnell, though, is attempting to break that link: His party has not actually done anything to make it harder for Americans to vote, he is arguing, and suggestions otherwise are “fake hysteria” Democrats have “ginned up” to “take over elections.”

“I think this is an excuse to try to break the Senate,” McConnell said in floor remarks last week. “This Big Lie—that democracy is dying because Democrats sometimes lose elections—is a completely astro-turfed sense of crisis. The emperor has no clothes.”

According to a memo distributed by McConnell’s office on Sunday, that’s a talking point that he and his GOP colleagues will be hammering in the coming weeks: that it’s not Republicans, but Democrats that are promulgating a Big Lie, and that it is Chuck Schumer and the Senate majority that’s working to undermine the integrity of the democratic process, not the GOP. “No party that would trash the Senate’s legislative traditions can be trusted to seize control over election laws across America,” McConnell said. “Nobody who is this desperate to take over our democracy on a one-party basis can be allowed to do it.”

McConnell is right, but of course he’s talking about the wrong party: Since Biden’s victory, Republican-controlled legislatures across the country have raced to enact laws making it more difficult to vote, while proponents of Trump’s Big Lie—that the 2020 election was “rigged”—seek positions to oversee the electoral process. Democrats have struggled to combat that multi-pronged effort, even as they correctly identify it as a threat, thanks to the filibuster, which McConnell has used to block House-passed voting legislation from even reaching debate in the Senate. With less than a year to go until midterms, Democrats are hoping to create a carve-out in the filibuster rules for voting rights. Whether they can ultimately do so depends on Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, the latter of whom McConnell pointedly referenced in his remarks last week: “There is no partial or limited nuclear option on the table,” the Senate minority leader said. “As the senior senator for West Virginia put it…whenever you start talking about carving things out, you end up eating the entire turkey.”

McConnell is hoping that Manchin remains steadfast, even as his Democratic colleagues lobby him to reverse course. But there also seems to be a larger project here. Republicans aren’t only campaigning to save the filibuster; they’re trying to cover up one Big Lie by telling another. If they can make it seem like it’s Democrats trying to “silence” Americans’ voices and run roughshod over democratic institutions, they can justify their own obstructionism and attacks on the system—especially if they divorce the election bills they’ve passed in 19 states from the Trumpian conspiracy theories that inspired them.

That may not convince anyone other than their own base. But the campaign could drown out Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who will again call for voter protections in a visit to Georgia this week, and other Democratic leaders, who are planning to hold votes on election legislation and the filibuster this month. “Republicans aren’t just trying to suppress the vote. They’re trying to subvert the vote. They’re trying to subvert the very machinery of the democratic process itself,” Schumer wrote last week. “We can’t let it happen. The Senate will act to support our democracy and protect voting rights.”

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