John McCain was a hard libertarian conservative, but he retained enough independence to tank Trump’s effort to destroy Obamacare. Mitt Romney was the GOP nominee for president in 2012, but he voted to remove Trump from office on two occasions. We owe both of these men a debt of gratitude, but they are no longer in the Senate. Is there anyone left who can replace them?
Collins and Murkowski, for different reasons I will discuss in a future post, have little sympathy for MAGA, so Trump has always known he can’t rely on them. As to the others, the most promising candidates are McConnell and David McCormick, the new senator from Pennsylvania. The former, while a GOP partisan to the core, fundamentally disagrees with Trump on issues relating to the Constitution and foreign policy; the latter won by a microscopic margin in what is still a blue state, so his continuing political survival will depend on his ability to separate himself from Trump when the latter gets out of control.