For months after the Jan. 6, 2021, rampage at the Capitol, the damaged window of Mitch McConnell’s office was left unrepaired, a graphic reminder of the moment when one of the rioters bashed the fortified glass with a flagpole. McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who was the Senate majority leader at the time, professed his disgust at what happened, calling it “further evidence of Donald Trump’s complete unfitness for office.”

According to “The Price of Power,” a new biography by Michael Tackett, McConnell already despised Trump, calling him “not very smart, irascible, nasty” and a “despicable human being.” But a month later, when presented with the opportunity to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial for what McConnell declared to be “as close to an impeachable offense as you can imagine,” he refused to take it. A conviction could have disqualified Trump from holding office again, but McConnell wasn’t ready to cast Trump into the political wilderness, at least not yet.

Nearly four years on, he still isn’t ready. McConnell says he will support Trump, whom he deems a “sleazeball,” in the 2024 election. As Tackett puts it, “He had no choice but to support the nominee.”

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“No choice”: The phrase implies an unwavering sense of duty and commitment, when in fact it is more useful in revealing what McConnell’s actual priorities are. He seems to have decided that Trump is reprehensible, wholly unfit for office and even a menace to the Republic. “I just hope that he’ll have to pay a price for it,” he told Tackett, referring to Trump’s efforts to try to overturn the 2020 election.

Such contortions are so common they have become a cliché: the establishment Republican who complains bitterly about Trump in private while supporting him anyway. McConnell, though, dials this dissonance up to 11. Fancying himself one of the shrewdest power brokers in politics, he nevertheless emerges from Tackett’s biography as someone who’s both pathetic and willfully perverse — wistfully calling for Trump’s comeuppance while doing everything in his power to thwart it.

“The Price of Power” promises an “intimate, personal view” of a politician who is famously controlling and tight-lipped. Since 2019, Tackett has been the deputy Washington bureau chief for The Associated Press; previously, he was a reporter for The New York Times (we do not know each other). McConnell sat down for more than 50 hours of interviews and granted Tackett access to his oral history project. A presumable factor in McConnell’s willingness to cooperate with this book is his decision to step down as Senate Republican leader at the end of this year, though he says that he plans to serve out his current Senate term, which ends in January 2027. As for his health, McConnell tells Tackett that episodes in which he froze midsentence while speaking to reporters were the lingering effects of a concussion.

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Like any dutiful biographer, Tackett wants to show that McConnell is more complex than the power-hungry operator his critics make him out to be. But there’s little here that counters what one unnamed Democratic senator says about McConnell, quoted in the book’s opening pages: “I think he’s a terribly cynical human being.”

Tackett tries mightily to make the most of his access. The first few chapters offer an inordinately granular account of McConnell’s early years in Alabama, and then Georgia, and then finally Kentucky. McConnell was an only child of doting middle-class parents. He contracted polio at 2 — an experience that Tackett says fueled McConnell’s high-achiever intensity as well as his sensitivity to criticism.

McConnell’s high school assignments offer a glimpse into the coming-of-age of an aspiring pol. He learned how to assemble a bland platitude: “When I die I want to be able to say to myself, ‘I made a contribution to this old world and tried to make it a better place to live in.’” And when the inspiration didn’t come, he figured out what to do in a pinch. Tackett quotes a 12th-grade essay by McConnell that “tracks in many respects word for word” (a windy way of saying it plagiarizes) a 1904 poem by Bessie Anderson Stanley.

Tackett’s storytelling gets more confident once his subject arrives in Washington, but I can understand why he would try to wring as much material from McConnell’s early years as he could. A figure like McConnell — guarded, determined, flatly uncharismatic — invites the curious biographer to search for a Rosebud. But McConnell himself has always expressed a frank preoccupation with power and money. As Alec MacGillis noted in “The Cynic” (2014), his short but incisive biography of McConnell, raising and controlling boatloads of cash became the means by which an ambitious politician could make up for his underwhelming persona.

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Such basic motivations would seem to be the most economical explanation for everything else — McConnell’s crusade against campaign finance reform, his obstructionist strategy against Barack Obama, his rank refusal to give onetime Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland even a hearing, his determination to ram through the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. An assiduous Tackett tries to find instances of McConnell using his power “nobly.” In 2016, McConnell requested that legislation to spur biomedical research be renamed in honor of Joe Biden’s deceased son, Beau. Joe Biden “considered it an act of personal decency,” Tackett writes. “McConnell had nothing to gain from doing so.”

True, but McConnell had nothing to lose either. Such an obvious gimme could only seem notable in an age of extreme political disaffection — disaffection that McConnell, with his wily maneuvering and his willingness to grind government to a halt when it suits his team, has arguably done plenty to stoke. Tackett may have obtained considerable access, in the sense of getting lots of interviews with McConnell; he diligently catches McConnell’s many inconsistencies and relentless expediency. But the analysis is woefully thin. Reading “The Price of Power,” you also wouldn’t know anything about McConnell’s three daughters, other than the fact that he had them with his first wife. Not a word about the youngest, Porter, who became a progressive activist trying to halt the flood of money into politics that her own father worked so hard to unleash.

Tackett ends the book with a scene at the 2024 Republican National Convention, when McConnell took the stage and “was roundly booed.” McConnell would come across as a more pitiable figure if the book had actually revealed a core self, one that was committed to an ideal, or at least a glimmer of one. An epilogue makes much of his support for Ukraine. But McConnell’s hawkishness on foreign policy comes across as a gambit, too. It’s not as if he credibly expresses sincere hopes for a world that’s more peaceful and just; he simply prefers to talk about the threats posed by authoritarians abroad instead of dealing with the glaring problems at home.

The overall sense you get from this biography is that McConnell has prioritized little besides his own political survival, even when the cost is government dysfunction, a fractured electorate, simmering grievances.

When he leaves his leadership position at the end of this year, McConnell, 82, will be ducking out just as the check arrives. Yes, power has a price — and McConnell has ensured that it will be paid not by him but by everyone else.

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Publication Notes:

‘THE PRICE OF POWER: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America and Lost His Party’
By Michael Tackett
Simon & Schuster. 397 pages. $32.50.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Jennifer Szalai/Kenny Holston
c. 2024 The New York Times Company