Mitch McConnell destroyed by hometown newspaper for bowing down to Trump

Political commentator and lawyer John David Dyche was recently asked by a national media organization to pre-write an obituary for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to be published after his death.

Instead, he wrote a scathing portrayal of his time in office for the senator's local paper The Lexington Herald-Leader — and he wants Senate's minority leader to read it.

Dyche starts out by saying he was once a supporter of McConnell's "before breaking with him in 2016 over Donald Trump."

Also complicating his objectivity for a McConnell obituary is the fact that he recently wrote a column in the Kentucky Lantern, in which he apologizes for having supported Republicans like McConnell "who abandoned their previously professed conservative principles to support or collaborate with Trump, the antithesis of true conservatism."

"I passed on penning an advance obituary. Fairness and good taste dictate that if I am going to say anything about McConnell for publication, I should say it while he is alive. Hence this piece," Dyche writes.

Dyche says he likes McConnell personally and has a lot of respect for his political skill. He also acknowledges that McConnell "has done much good" during his political career. "However, since Trump’s rise and takeover of the Republican Party, McConnell’s vaunted political acumen has failed him at critical times."

During the rise of Trump, Dyche says that McConnell, like himself, underestimated Trump's popularity and the burgeoning MAGA movement. McConnell, like others in his party, thought Trump would lose to Hillary Clinton in 2016. When Trump won, McConnell thought he could use Trump to his benefit.

As a result, McConnell’s role as an "amoral, purely transactional collaborator in the normalization of Trump’s cruel, proto-fascist, venal, and vulgar demagoguery will have even worse and longer lasting destructive consequences for our constitutional democracy."

Read the full op-ed over at The Lexington Herald-Leader.