You can always trust Trevor Noah and his team over at The Daily Show. They always know how to cover important topics that matter to us as citizens while poking fun at it all, and giving us some perspective at the same time that saves us from pulling our hair out. That’s what happened in The Daily Showography of Mitch McConnell: “No Lips, No Soul, No Problem.”
Now, the title, first and foremost, is a thing of beauty. Whoever came up with it should get a raise and then some because they’re right. There’s no hurdle you can’t take on in the U.S. government when you have no soul. And taking us on this journey through the life of Mitch McConnell is Desi Lydic, a Daily Show correspondent responsible for hits like Who Is “Florida Man”?
Right off the bat, you know that this is going to be a wild ride through pointing out hypocrisy and the changes McConnell’s made along the way to the U.S. government with the opening line of, “He’s one of the most influential figures of his generation. A political strategist with the cunning of a fox and the charisma of a salted slug. But what does he really have to grin about?”
And when they mean Showography, they mean we’re gonna start way back when McConnell was a child and what hit him the hardest at such a young age. “At age 2 Mitch faced his first and only personal challenge, which he would later recall in a campaign ad.” Apparently, when he was a child during World War II, he contracted polio. He recovered, but it almost left his family broke. In response, McConnell introduced a bill “to make sure health care is available to all Kentucky families.”
And like his polio, McConnell made it through that phase of his life and wanting to help Americans have the coverage they needed. How? Well, by continuously trying to replace Obamacare and then shifting over to just repealing it altogether. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves when it comes to Mitch McConnell’s showography. First, we have to break down the years when he was infected with “early-onset politician.”
I know, the horror. But it’s true. The difference is that Mitch McConnell wasn’t the deadbeat he is now. “He was pro-union, pro-choice, and he attended Martin Luther King’s March on Washington.” Almost unbelievable, right? Knowing the Mitch we do now, he’s more likely to file a noise complaint, as Desi Lydic joked he was actually doing when he went to the march.
What follows is McConnell’s steady rise through the Republican party until he decided to take a run at the United States Senate. And not so surprisingly … there was little interest—that is, until McConnell got help from Roger Ailes, “future Fox CEO and first-ballot Hall of Fame sexual predator.” Yes, that man, McConnell went to help for.
He went on to win and invested most of his time giving back to those that helped him. He went after political campaign money by agreeing to have more of it (big shocker there) and made his money by marrying Elaine Chao, an heiress that made him the richest man in the Senate. In Lydic’s words, “With wealth, power, and the integrity of one ply toilet paper, Mitch became his parties leader in the Senate.”
And he made it his mission to ardently back whatever Republicans, those who got him to where he was now, believed in at that moment—whether it was “making sure” that President Obama was a one term President or blocking any legislation he laid forth, McConnell made sure he was the Gandalf of the Republican party who would go, “You shall not pass!” Oh and he became besties with the filibuster, grinding the government to a halt any chance he got.
What follows is years upon years of Mitch saying he was here for the American people while blocking new Supreme Court justices from being selected during an election year before swinging around and doing the exact opposite when his comb-over and orange-colored-looking bestie wanted to make his own changes. Yes, I’m talking about former President Donald J. Trump.
Those were the years that truly defined McConnell and still do so to this day. And even when Donald J. Trump dragged him through the mud for years, even after inciting an insurrection on January 6th that shook this nation, McConnell listened to that instinct inside him that told him “let’s screw over more people” by then saying he would back Trump once again if he were the Republican presidential nominee in 2024.
This is his legacy. Personally, I hope no one ever forgets what he stood for and the mess he’s made of our government, one filibuster at a time. And thanks to The Daily Show‘s Showography, we don’t have to.
(image: The Daily Show with Trevor Noah Youtube)
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