Recycling household plastic is apparently a well understood failure, though that hasn’t stopped this very expensive business from going forward.  Nor have Democrat hacks tired of the trick of recycling old Republican quotes right before an election and claiming they were somehow news.

Bob Woodward did this with Trump in 2020, right before the election.

Now we have the AP’s Michal Tackett, with a new biography of Mitch McConnell coming out next week, doing the same thing.  In this case, Tackett is spicing up the McConnell-Trump feud with some private notes from McConnell from years ago.  Sure, this was news — in 2016.

Everybody knows that the two have long despised each other — not just through leaks, but from nasty public quotes from both men over the years.

That didn’t stop McConnell from playing nice with Trump to get his wife her dream job: secretary of transportation.  This time around, McConnell is officially endorsing Trump again, explaining that people like J.D. Vance and Lindsey Graham have said much worse about Trump than he.

As anyone alive at the time remembers, in the wake of the January 6 riots, McConnell was shaken to his core by the protests in the Capitol.  The inner sanctum of his life’s meaning was violated.  He was publicly angry in a way I don’t ever recall seeing him.  As they say in so many bad movies, “this time...it’s personal.”

McConnell made speeches excoriating Trump, like this one in 2021 threatening to vote to convict in the impeachment case.

After he vented his spleen, apparently his more studious colleagues, especially Chuck Grassley, then explained to him that there was no mileage for Republicans voting to convict, nor was there any legal basis for doing so.

After the wild political events the last two years, I am sure Sen. McConnell is now happy he did not burn down all his GOP bridges in 2021.  Instead, he will finish his tenure as leader, most likely with a GOP majority returning, and claim the powerful Finance Committee chair as a retirement present for the final two years of his term.

He never has to see or speak to Donald Trump again, which, I am sure, makes both men very happy.  It just isn’t news.

 Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, Ky.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.