McConnell might fairly seem to be a pure Machiavellian player singularly focused on his own power and on his Senate majority, a backroom tactician of the kind that doesn’t much exist in a theatrical age. But the animosity between the two men, Trump and McConnell, was total—and for McConnell, an emotional reveal for a cold man. The Republican leader’s view of Trump was as virulent as the most virulent liberal’s view: Trump was ignorant, corrupt, incompetent, unstable. Worse, he called into question the value and seriousness of every aspect of McConnell’s Machiavellian achievement—what good was power if you had to share it with people who had no respect for it? Every day for the past four years, McConnell had struggled not to bend—at least not privately to bend, as so many others had—to the headbanger in the White House. The price of private virtue was to endure the humiliations of having to, begrudgingly, publicly bend (further complicated by the awkward fact that his wife, Elaine Chao, was Trump’s secretary of transportation—an earlier Trump effort to buy off McConnell). McConnell had a coat of impervious armor like a Marvel comic character; little ever got through. But it was impossible to overstate the hatred he had for Trump, a central, if unseen, drama of the Trump years. It was of an ultimate kind in politics—it was, that is, personal—and not just a hatred of Trump but of his allies and staffers, too. Politics is tribal, and those in the Trump camp understood that if a propitious opportunity presented itself, McConnell would deal with them as he would like to deal with the president.

And yet, on McConnell’s part, it was in the weeks after the election still a standard, if increasingly strained, Republican leadership Trump response: placate, humor him, and assume he would lose focus and that the crisis would wane with his attention span. It was a waiting game for the courts to rule against the president, who would then move on to some other outrage to distract from that. McConnell had really not figured that even Trump would be capable of ignoring the reality that every single court that the election challenge had come before had ruled against him. He would—he must—fold, however huffily, at some point, McConnell assumed.

On December 15, after the formal certification of electors by their respective state legislatures, McConnell, in a move about which no one could doubt the meaning, reached out to Biden. “Our system of government has processes to determine who will be sworn in on Jan. 20. The Electoral College has spoken. So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.”