McConnell loses the plot to Trump on Ukraine and immigration

Thursday might be remembered as the day Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell lost the plot, the message and his power to Donald Trump.

For the past few months, Mr McConnell has dispatched Senator James Lankford, a conservative Republican from Oklahoma, to negotiate a deal with Democrats to add restrictions on immigration in exchange for more Ukraine aid to repel Russia’s aggression.

Republicans know Democrats would not normally agree to these types of restrictions if a Republican were president or Democrats would filibuster them if Republicans had the majority. So they are using the fact that Democrats desperately want money for Ukraine to extract as much as possible from Democrats.

But on Wednesday, Punchbowl News reported that Mr McConnell told the Senate Republican conference that “politics on this have changed” since Mr Trump wanted to run on immigration and “we don’t want to do anything to undermine him.”

Those remarks immediately threw the Senate Republican conference into chaos. Immediately, some Republicans said that Mr McConnell’s words were misinterpreted.

Mr Lankford later told reporters that essentially, Mr McConnell was giving historical context and that when negotiations began last year, the election had not yet begun, but now it has.

“But he was very clear, he's not making any recommendation,” he said. “He's not backing away from this. We're still working. I was not instructed by the leader to be able to stop working on this.”

Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who was initially part of the negotiations, sounded even more furious, calling the allegation that McConnell pulled out of negotiations “parallel universe s***.”

He later elaborated, telling reporters that Republicans who support Mr Trump