Trump and Moscow Mitch
By 
Jane Mayer has a good and long piece on Mitch McConnell and how he learned to be Donald Trump’s lackey, which concludes with a summary of why this was politically necessary:
But, as they feuded, McConnell’s popularity cratered in Kentucky. Dave Contarino, a Democratic operative in the state who opposes McConnell, was polling and doing focus groups, and he told me that the Senator’s approval rating fell to seventeen per cent. His poll numbers didn’t recover until mid-2018, when he defended Trump during the Kavanaugh confirmation fight. “It rescued him with conservatives, who said that finally he was acting like a Republican and supporting our President,” Contarino said. McConnell’s defense of Trump during the impeachment trial boosted him further at home. Gary Ball, the Martin County newspaper editor, told me, “People here love Trump. McConnell’s not so popular. But we loved what McConnell did for Trump during impeachment.”
In McConnell’s reëlection race against McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot, he has been trying to make Trump his virtual running mate. And now that McConnell has helped eliminate nearly all meaningful spending restraints, he can count on practically unlimited funds from billionaire donors. His campaign has already raised $25.6 million, although McGrath has raised even more. Matt Jones, a popular sports-radio host and the co-author of “Mitch, Please!,” a scathing book about McConnell, said, “The quickest way for him to be beaten is to turn on Trump.” Jones told me that he and his co-author had interviewed people in every one of Kentucky’s hundred and twenty counties, and had found only one, an elderly farmer, who was a big McConnell fan. “McConnell’s hated here,” he told me. “And Trump is loved. He has no choice but to kiss Trump’s ring.”
Until recently, McConnell’s enabling of Trump has worked well for him, if not for the country. But it has now made him complicit in a crisis whose end is nowhere in sight. As the consequences of the Trump Presidency become lethally clear, his deal looks costlier every day. The trusted Cook Political Report recently downgraded the chances that Republicans would hold their Senate majority to a fifty-fifty tossup, after conservative strategists reported widespread alarm over Trump’s handling of the pandemic.
Having said that, Senate elections have effectively become referenda on the president now, so there’s not much McConnell could have done to distance Senate Republicans from him anyway. It is worth noting that the the unusually small rally effect Trump got at the beginning of the pandemic is already eroding:
It seems pretty unlikely that months of mass unemployment and death are going to make this better rather than worse. Which is good news for Democratic chances of taking both the White House and the Senate, and also why McConnell is so desperate to make the election as unfair as possible.