On the first Saturday of every August, the Saint Jerome Catholic Church in the tiny town of Fancy Farm, Kentucky, hosts a picnic renowned for its mutton-and-pork barbecue. Since 1880, the scent of smoked meat has attracted people; the whiff of votes then attracted politicians. The picnic long ago morphed into the premier event in the state’s campaign season, attracting its most famous officeholders. As attendees eat sandwiches, browse for We love Jesus and BBQ too T-shirts, or try to win a hunting blind at bingo, they also encounter candidates of all parties, who share one outdoor stage and are given only a few minutes to address a rowdy, heckling crowd.This year, however, Fancy Farm was most remarkable for who did not show up: Mitch McConnell. Now in his 42nd and final year as a senator, the Republican has been a fixture of the event, attending 30 times. As GOP leader in the Senate for 18 years, McConnell became famous for his bare-knuckled, Machiavellian approach to politics—a method grounded in gradually amassing control through unflashy strategy and exploiting leverage for partisan ends. No man has so thoroughly thwarted Democratic ambitions, which he did both by championing the filibuster and by securing a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. Despite the longtime Senate leader’s absence from Fancy Farm, the specter of McConnellism hung over the event. And it will hang over America for years, too.On June 14, McConnell, who is not running for reelection, was hospitalized, taken by ambulance after he was found unconscious at his home in Washington, D.C. The 84-year-old has not been seen in public, let alone Congress, since. The two proof-of-life photos that his staff released have only provoked feverish speculation. Onstage at Fancy Farm, Charles Booker, the Democratic nominee to replace the senator, invoked Carmen Sandiego. “Where in the world is Mitch McConnell?” Booker asked. “What is going on with Mitch McConnell?” Supportive Democrats broke out in sporadic chants of “Where’s Mitch?”[Mark Leibovich: Mitch McConnell and the president he calls ‘despicable’]Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, a potential presidential contender, has not shied away from stirring up suspicion. Late last month, he sent a letter urging McConnell “to directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign.” The implication has been that the master Republican tactician may be incapacitated, perhaps even deceased, but left instructions to hide this fact until after August 3—at which point Beshear would have severe difficulties installing a replacement. (Beshear has insisted that this deadline, now passed, has “no legal impact.”) Even in the twilight of McConnell’s influence, Democrats feared that he was capable of one last great trick.On Thursday, however, McConnell announced that he had been discharged from a rehabilitation center and would be working from home. The explanation for his absence turned out not to involve any convoluted conspiracy. McConnell had suffered a serious fall, just as he has in the past, and contracted pneumonia. In 2023, a similar incident resulted in a concussion and a fractured rib. Then, too, his office released only sparse and cryptic details about his condition. Eventually, McConnell returned to work and to doing what he did best: stymying the Democrats.Recently I asked the reporter Al Cross, considered the dean of Kentucky journalism, whether McConnell had anything that could be called an ideology, or whether he was merely interested in amassing power. Without hesitating, Cross answered, “The second.” He noted that McConnell and his first wife, a feminist scholar, had had a pet named Rocky, after Nelson Rockefeller—a hero of the GOP’s now-extinct liberal wing. “He was a Rockefeller Republican,” Cross told me. “And only when the party began moving to the right did he move to the right, because he wanted to be a leader in the party. You know, this is a guy who never wanted to be anything but a politician.” McConnell’s greatest personal policy commitment seems to have been to deregulate campaign finance, which the Supreme Court eventually delivered. What most earned him both his power and the disdain of Democrats was his devotion to party above all else.The GOP for which McConnell tirelessly worked is now firmly in the hands of Donald Trump, a man whom McConnell deeply detests and yet whose ascent he has repeatedly enabled. Had McConnell not held open a Supreme Court seat after the 2016 death of Antonin Scalia, perhaps Trump would not have gained enough support from anti-abortion voters to win that year’s presidential election. Had McConnell tried to whip votes in favor of Trump’s conviction after his supporters attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, perhaps the party could have exorcised him. McConnell got what he wished for—the first line of his obituary will note that he was the longest-serving party leader in Senate history—but at what cost?He and the president are intertwined in history, Scott Jennings, a former McConnell strategist turned prominent Trump defender, told me. “Twenty, 50, or 100 years from now, what will be remembered most about the era and their time together is that McConnell and his political decisions enabled Trump to win the presidency, change the Supreme Court, cut taxes, and, frankly, take a pretty firm hand on international matters,” Jennings said. McConnell did not just shatter political norms by depriving Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee of a hearing in 2016. He also pushed through Trump’s nominees and, more than any other person, influenced the selection of appellate judges who will shape America for decades.His influence over the political system will persist in other, subtler ways. “McConnell’s people were superb at taking young Republicans under their wings and nurturing them,” Stephen Voss, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky, told me. “And those folks are spread out all over the state and also Washington, D.C.”In his home state, McConnell commands respect. He routed huge sums of federal money to Kentucky—$65 billion, by some estimates. He personally remade state politics. McConnell also regularly intervened in local elections, from the state legislature all the way down to county clerks. Democrats dominated the state when he started his career; today, they are largely shut out of power. Beshear won the governorship only to have his vetoes routinely overturned by a Republican supermajority in the state legislature. “It’s a Mitch McConnell–constructed party, even if some of the people at the grassroots don’t like him. It’s impossible to deny that he is the architect of it,” Tres Watson, a Republican strategist, told me. That is why the state GOP headquarters, in Frankfort, carries his name.One week after the November 2024 election, which returned Trump to the White House, I watched McConnell receive the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute. Robert Doar, AEI’s president, asked McConnell if he had any regrets. “Yeah, but I’m not going to tell you,” he replied.Despite stating in 2021 that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for his supporters’ attack on the Capitol, McConnell said that he could not vote to convict the president in an impeachment trial, because Trump’s term had expired. Cross told me that, during that period, McConnell was convinced that Trump was doomed in the party. McConnell told Michael Tackett, his biographer, that his position differed from that of Liz Cheney—who sacrificed a promising career leading Republicans in the House of Representatives—because “I didn’t see how blowing yourself up and taking yourself off the playing field was helpful to getting the party back to where she and I probably both think it ought to be.” After the trial, McConnell and Trump did not speak again for almost four years.McConnell gave up his leadership role right as Trump returned to power. In his final Senate term, in which he returned to being a legislative backbencher, McConnell lodged his protests against Trump by voting against several of his nominees (Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) and strongly supporting Ukraine and free trade.[David A. Graham: Mike Johnson would prefer not to]At Fancy Farm, McConnell’s fellow Republicans largely papered over the schism between the biggest figure in national politics and the biggest figure in state politics. In a mark of how important McConnell has been in fostering Republicans in the state, the primary race to succeed him was between three Republicans who had all worked for him previously. Nate Morris, a man who once interned for him and then made his fortune by founding a trash-and-recycling company, tried to win by repudiating him. He released an ad showing himself riding a garbage truck saying that he was a “Trump ‘America First’ conservative” who was here “to take out the trash” by dumping McConnell. This strategy did not succeed; before the primary could occur, Morris was whisked away by Trump for the prestigious post of ambassador to Colombia. Instead the victory went to Andy Barr, a McConnellite congressman from Lexington. When I asked him what McConnell’s legacy would be, he cited three things: building up the GOP in Kentucky, “opposing unconstitutional restrictions on political speech,” and “working with President Trump to deliver a conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court and a conservative, originalist federal judiciary.”For the country as a whole, though, what McConnell’s many political victories leave behind is more dismal. His lasting contribution to the Senate is its calcification. Few people understood leverage and Senate procedure as well as McConnell; the routine use of the filibuster (which Democrats are also guilty of) has now set a precedent in which the party in power can confirm judges and pass tax bills but struggles to accomplish much else. The lack of a functional Congress has hastened the executive branch’s arrogation of the legislature’s previous responsibilities. This diminishes the separation of powers that McConnell (and his strictly constitutionalist judges) claim to be upholding.The negative consequences for Republicans may become apparent only when Democrats have a turn at power in McConnell’s beloved chamber. Because of his specific decisions—to hold open a Supreme Court seat on the theory that it was too close to an election in 2016, before doing the exact opposite in 2020—it is now inconceivable that a Democratic-led Senate would confirm another Trump justice if a vacancy arose. McConnell’s political career is ending, but his legacy will last much longer. Unfortunately, it has left America much harder to govern.