Tuesday morning’s edition of Punchbowl News AM doesn’t include any direct quotes from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on why he backed down from the border-Ukraine-Israel bill he just spent months and a shit ton of intra-GOP political capital trying to cobble together with Democrats, just that he “said his view was that the problem isn’t the bill itself but that the political mood in the country has shifted since the Senate first began this effort four months ago. This is a reference to former President Donald Trump’s surge toward the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, plus the poor outlook for the proposal among House GOP lawmakers,” emphasis ours to emphasize how fucking stupid this is, that a once-tenacious and formidable leader who for decades has been all to pleased to impose his will on the American people would just bitch out like this.

Do they realize how this is going to look when the House debates impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in just a few hours from now? That the Democrats now get to cite all the shit that Trump posted on Truth Social, the head of the goddamned Border Patrol Union endorsing the bill, quotes like one of McConnell’s deputies, Wyoming MAGA Senator John Barrasso telling Politico that “Americans will turn to the upcoming election to end the border crisis”?

The asshole literally used the words “border crisis” and they want to wait 11 months to address it, betting that fat former President Trump is going to win in November when he’s facing 91 felony charges, a serious cash crunch due to legal fees, a non-zero chance of being disqualified in key states in the electoral college, a surging economy under Biden, and so on and so forth. Not to mention McConnell himself just a few weeks ago telling his caucus that Trump would never get a similar border security package passed even with majorities in both chambers in 2025.