Even Mitch McConnell’s Daughters Probably Hate Him

Jane Mayer has written a long profile of vaguely humanoid turd and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and in it, Mayer highlights what we have all known to be true—McConnell’s lack of anything resembling political principles beyond maintaining an iron grip on power with his mottled claw-like hands and his unholy political alliance with Donald Trump, a man he claims to loathe in private yet has no qualms effusively supporting in public.

But did you know that he has three daughters with his ex-wife and that, based on Mayer’s ace reporting, there is a high probability that his daughters hate him? At the very least, they certainly seem to hate his politics.

From the New Yorker:

McConnell also appears to have lost the political support of his three daughters. The youngest, Porter, is a progressive activist who is the campaign director for Take On Wall Street, a coalition of labor unions and nonprofit groups which advocates against the “predatory economic power” of “banks and billionaires.” One of its targets has been Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Blackstone Group, who, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, has, since 2016, donated nearly thirty million dollars to campaigns and super PACs aligned with McConnell. Last year, Take On Wall Street condemned Blackstone’s “detrimental behavior” and argued that the company’s campaign donations “cast a pall on candidates’ ethics.”

Porter McConnell has also publicly criticized the Senate’s confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh, which her father considers one of his greatest achievements. On Twitter, she accused Kavanaugh’s supporters of misogyny, and retweeted a post from StandWithBlaseyFord, a Web site supporting Christine Blasey Ford, one of Kavanaugh’s accusers. The husband of McConnell’s middle daughter, Claire, has also criticized Kavanaugh online, and McConnell’s eldest daughter, Eleanor, is a registered Democrat.

To be a fly on the wall of what I imagine to be their very awkward family dinners! Porter, Claire, and Eleanor declined to speak with Mayer for this profile, so my assessment of how they feel about their father is perhaps overblown. But consider the political leanings of their mother Sherrill Redmon, who divorced McConnell in 1980. Again, per the New Yorker:

After the marriage ended, Redmon, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, left Kentucky and took over a women’s-history archive at Smith College, in Massachusetts, where she collaborated with Gloria Steinem on the Voices of Feminism Oral History Project. In an e-mail, Steinem told me that Redmon rarely spoke about McConnell, and noted, “Despite Sherrill’s devotion to recording all of women’s lives, she didn’t talk about the earlier part of her own.” Steinem’s understanding was that McConnell’s political views had once been different. “I can only imagine how painful it must be to marry and have children with a democratic Jekyll and see him turn into a corrupt and authoritarian Hyde,” she wrote.

According to Mayer, Redmon is “working on a tell-all memoir.” At least we now have something to look forward to!

(Updated 3/2/22 with new details)