The Back Channel Talks to Secure McConnell's Endorsement of Trump

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

68% : He already has the backing of House Speaker Mike Johnson, and on Sunday he was endorsed by Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, who is McConnell's deputy and No. 2 in the Senate Republican leadership.
67% : With his primary victory over Nikki Haley in her home state of South Carolina on Saturday, Trump has now swept through all of the first voting states with comfortable margins, and polls show him leading the more than a dozen Super Tuesday contests.
62% : Trump was still the most popular Republican in the country.
55% : Asked about this, Daines said in a statement, "I'm encouraging the Republican Party to unite behind President Trump.
54% : It's been a while since Trump has demeaned McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao, as "Coco Chow" or as McConnell's "China-loving wife."
52% : In recent months, as it became obvious that Trump appeared likely to win the GOP nomination for a third time, McConnell assured his colleagues that he would do whatever it takes to unify the party and win back control of the Senate.
51% : The secretive conversations between the Trump and McConnell camps have been happening between key advisers to both men who have known and worked with each other for more than 20 years: Chris LaCivita, a top campaign adviser to Trump, and Josh Holmes, a confidant and longtime political strategist for McConnell.
51% : McConnell's crowning achievement was working with Trump to transform the Supreme Court -- confirming three conservative justices who have gone on to achieve long-standing Republican goals such as overturning Roe v. Wade.
50% : Trump faces his first criminal trial in late March and is eager to consolidate every faction of the party and its donor class behind him as soon as possible.
48% : Assuming it happens, McConnell's endorsement of Trump would have enormous symbolic value to the former president, giving him the embrace of the last holdout of Republican power whose rejection of him represents the final patch of unconquered territory in Trump's march to the party's 2024 presidential nomination.
45% : By late January, Trump had told people close to him that he expected McConnell would endorse him.
45% : Absolutely." Throughout 2021 and 2022, whenever McConnell was asked in private about Trump, he would assure his audience that the best way to handle the former president was to ignore him rather than to attack him head-on, as Liz Cheney was doing.
43% : And McConnell oversaw a conference of senators who mostly wished Trump would disappear but who also knew that their political survival depended on their staying on the good side of the party's angry MAGA base.
39% : McConnell has always said he'll endorse the nominee of the Republican Party, even when pressed specifically about Trump, whom he had described as "practically and morally responsible" for provoking the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
34% : I don't know that I can work with him," Trump told Ingraham.
34% : On Feb. 13, 2021, in a speech on the Senate floor to explain his decision not to convict on constitutional grounds, McConnell laid out what amounted to his own indictment of Trump.
33% : "President Trump is the presumptive nominee and it is time for the entire party to coalesce behind him to defeat Crooked Joe Biden," Trump's communications director, Steven Cheung, said in a statement to The New York Times when asked about the private conversations between LaCivita and Holmes.
30% : He told people close to him that he never expected to talk to Trump again.
29% : The relationship between Trump and McConnell was never warm and probably never will be.
28% : And he told Senate colleagues that he was seriously considered voting to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial, but ultimately decided against it.
27% : Public deference to Trump became the price of keeping their jobs.
25% : But compared with the kinds of things Trump has previously said about McConnell -- including regular comparisons to feces -- these comments were interpreted by McConnell allies as punches being pulled.
25% : Still, McConnell has watched in recent weeks as a bipartisan immigration bill that he had pushed for died, with Trump egging on those lawmakers who helped kill it.
24% : McConnell said that day that he thought the criminal justice system was a more appropriate venue to hold Trump accountable for his actions leading up to Jan. 6 and that Trump is "still liable for everything he did while he was in office."
20% : But McConnell is nothing if not practical, and during Trump's presidency he set aside his own contempt for Trump and worked with him to pass a major tax cuts law and to confirm a record number of federal judges.
19% : McConnell came to view Trump as a dangerous liability after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and the loss of two critical Senate races in Georgia for which he blamed the former president's destructive behavior.
16% : This is no small thing, given that Trump has been forced to spend more than $50 million already on legal bills, and the groups supporting him are expected to be vastly outspent by President Joe Biden's operation.
14% : When the interviewer, Bret Baier, pushed him on whether he would support Trump if he came back to capture the Republican nomination, McConnell, who at that time thought Trump was a problem of the past, replied: "The nominee of the party?
2% : " When Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked Trump directly about McConnell at a town hall last week, Trump criticized the Senate minority leader, but gently by Trump's standards.

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