I thought it was a pathetic speech, Mitch McConnell’s last one as a senator in any leadership position.  He gave it right before Christmas in 2024, and it came across as petty but very revealing.  As I say all this, I get high-level politics and understand all too well how tough it can be working with people who disagree with you.  I am used to spending most of my time overcoming the objections of people who disagree with me and working hard to turn them into my way of thinking.  Not through force, but by showing them how much they would benefit from doing so.  Some of my best friends are powerful politicians who have to do that every day.  They work with everybody and anybody.  And for that matter, I understand Trump because he has all these traits naturally.  And since he first ran for office, or talked about it, back in the late 1990s with the Reform Party, I thought Trump would be great in a political role because he knows how to get things done and overcome people’s objections while showing them the benefit of agreeing with him.  That’s more of an Art of the Deal than a political thing.  However, that is what Mitch McConnell talked about in his last speech.  Instead, he referred insultingly to what he thinks people in politics are or should be doing.  And he narrowed it all down to two key ingredients that everyone who gets into political office seeks to do, based on all his vast years of experience in the Senate.  He says there are two kinds of people who go to the Senate: people who want to make a point, and those who want to make a difference. 

Mitch came across as an old man trying to learn to play video games.  What I heard from him was a frustrated person who realized that the game had changed from underneath him, and he had no idea how to adapt to it.  He was at the end of his career and wouldn’t be a part of anything under these new rules, and he was frustrated.  The world was going to move on without him, and he was not being revered as a great Senator who had been a leader for many decades.  He was being viewed as an Anti-Trump loser who sold our country out and was the kind of person who put his name on that CR at the end of 2024 that had been 1500 pages and lost the battle to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on the X platform in getting the bill crushed before a vote could be made.  What replaced that bill was a much more narrowly focused CR with many bells and whistles removed, which bothered Mitch McConnell.  And that frustration came out in his speech when he referred to those against his way of doing politics as just getting involved to make a point.  I think what he said revealed why so many members of the Senate and the House have problems because they never did understand what getting into politics was supposed to be.  I find Mitch McConnell revolting, not because he was anti-Trump but because he had so much power, but he never used that power to build a replacement bridge on I-75 going over from Cincinnati into Northern Kentucky.  At one point in 2012, he shared the powers of government with John Boehner, who was Speaker of the House and lived right across the Ohio River and was just as motivated.  But both men dropped the ball and got caught up in the Washington game of Beltway politics where the lobbyists rule the day, and they became part of the problem.  Certainly not a solution. We still don’t have a bridge after decades of trying.  And they had all the levers of power to make it happen.

It’s not like I don’t know the type of people I think should be in the Senate.  I would say I know J.D. Vance pretty well.  He’s from my area, and I’ve met him often.  He’s nothing like Mitch McConnell.  I also know the newly elected Bernie Moreno.  I was one of his very first supporters and was invited to have lunch personally with him in the early stages of his campaign, and I was able to talk to him about why he was running.  He did not run for the Senate to make a difference or a point.  He wanted to be a good manager in the Senate, representing Ohio along the way.  When we voted for him, we were not voting for a MAGA disrupter who just wanted to make a point.  We wanted President Trump’s management support in the Senate so he could be a better president.  I also asked J.D. Vance and Bernie Moreno the same question privately.  I said, “If you get in, are you just going to be another louse hanging out on K-Street making deals with scum bags who want to destroy this country in trade for the benefits of some whore standing on the street corner?”  In both cases, they said to me “no Mr. Hoffman.  Absolutely not.”  J.D. Vance kept his promise so far and was an excellent Senator until Trump picked him to be V.P.  So we know the difference between a J.D. Vance, who was new, and an old corrupt politician like Mitch McConnell. 

And yes, when I spoke to both of those guys and many others in the House and Senate, that was my typical question to break the ice.  I am always interested in how they answer, and I can tell a lot by nonverbal communication, whether they are lying to me or sincere.  That’s my way of doing things, and it’s always why I tend to be in a position to ask those questions in the first place.  People respect my opinion and like it when I’m part of the process, especially on the front end.  In doing this kind of thing for several decades, I have known Mitch McConnell, and many have liked him over the years.  And they take the easy way out and listen to all the lobbyists when they shouldn’t.  And they played their role in jacking up our debt to over 35 trillion dollars and adding another trillion in wasteful spending every 100 days.  And they do all that calling the effort compromise.  When what they are doing is packing vast amounts of evil in these bills, passing them so everyone can get what they want, and selling that corruption as a good government that compromises with the bad guys.  Then, they say to their critics that compromising is more virtuous than standing your ground on anything.  And those who do are the kind of people who want to make a point.  They don’t understand how government works, and they certainly don’t understand the Senate.  But to my eyes, all that McConnell said on his way out the door sounded like a 90-year-old grandpa with one foot in the grave trying to learn to play Fortnite with a 7-year-old, slow, crusty and complaining about how fast the world was moving because he didn’t have the skills to play the game.  And that is why Mitch McConnell is out of the Senate, and we are all happy that he is.   

Rich Hoffman

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