"In terms of tactical manoeuvring in the Senate he is one of the best we have ever seen. "You can make a strong case that he is a bigger threat to everything Democrats believe in than Trump." Gravestones of "slain" political adversaries tweeted by Mitch McConnell's campaign team. Credit:Twitter Matt Jones, a television and radio broadcaster from McConnell's home state of Kentucky, agrees. "Most of what Trump says is just bluster, he is not a mastermind," says Jones, who is writing a book titled Mitch Please!: How Mitch McConnell sold out Kentucky (and America too).

"When he wants to, McConnell is able to make things happen. He is the brains behind the operation. That's why he's seen as such a force." Unlike Trump, McConnell isn't a charismatic figure and would never fill an arena with admirers. He's calculated and strategic, a student of history who is willing to play the long game to achieve his policy goals. McConnell, 77, has been in the US Senate for 34 years and is the longest-serving Republican Senate leader in the country's history. It is he who decides what will come to the Senate floor for a vote, effectively giving him the same veto power as the President. He is the man currently preventing a Senate vote on gun control, election security or an increase in the minimum wage.

"If you put something like universal background checks for gun purchases before the Senate it would probably pass something like 80 votes to 20," Jones says. "But McConnell believes the major Republican donors - the NRA especially - don't want it. So he will not put it to a vote." Mitch McConnell on Capitol Hill during the failed bid to replace Barack Obama's healthcare legislation in July 2017. Credit:Bloomberg Democrats have nicknamed him the "Grim Reaper" because the Senate has become a place where bills go to die under his leadership. The chamber was once famous for deliberation and compromise; now it is synonymous with obstruction and gridlock. While it has become rare for major bills to pass the Senate, McConnell has turned the chamber into an incredibly productive machine for confirming conservative judges. In just 2½ years, Trump and McConnell have appointed nearly a quarter of the nation's federal appeals court judges, one in seven of district court judges and two Supreme Court justices.

"I dominated the debate last night,” McConnell said with a smile, the day after the Democratic contenders duked it out in Miami. "And here was their complaint: they said all he’s doing is stopping what the House is sending over and confirming conservative judges. I plead guilty." Living with the Donald McConnell never wanted Donald Trump. He originally supported fellow Kentucky senator Rand Paul, and gave Trump only a lukewarm endorsement when it became clear he would win the party's nomination.

"I have committed to supporting the nominee chosen by Republican voters, and Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee, is now on the verge of clinching that nomination," McConnell said in May 2016. During the election campaign, he criticised Trump when he called a Hispanic judge biased, when he attacked a military family and when a tape emerged of Trump bragging about groping women. But McConnell played a crucial - and some argue decisive - role in Trump's election victory. Their differences notwithstanding, Mitch McConnell's obstructionism in Congress played a key role in the rise of Donald Trump. Credit:Bloomberg The pivotal moment came in February 2016 when Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, the court's leading conservative, suddenly died. If Barack Obama had been able to replace him he would have created a 5-4 progressive majority on the country's most powerful court.

Instead, McConnell declared that he would not allow confirmation hearings for any Supreme Court nominee until after the presidential election - a unprecedented move in US history. "He came up with the idea very quickly, within hours of Scalia passing away, and he implemented it brilliantly," says Curt Levey, president of conservative advocacy group the Committee for Justice. "It was very impressive." McConnell has since described the decision not to fill Scalia's vacancy as "the most consequential thing I've ever done". Leaving the Supreme Court seat open helped convince conservatives unsettled by Trump's style to hold their noses and vote for him. "I doubt Donald Trump would have won if that seat was not open," Republican senator Tom Cotton recently told The New York Times.

But historian Christopher Browning, an expert on the rise of Nazism, says McConnell's obstructionist tactics are unforgivable. "If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell," he wrote last year in The New York Review of Books. "He stoked the hyperpolarisation of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralysed as he possibly could." Matt Jones, who is considering a Senate run against McConnell, says: "He has ruined a lot of our democratic norms. "He really only cares about one thing and that's power. When he was elected in 1984 he was pro-choice, pro-civil rights, he was seen as a moderate Republican. As the Republican Party has drifted right, so has he.

"His second objective is making rich people happy. He has done more for the wealthy than maybe any elected representative in the history of this country." A theme throughout McConnell's career has been his opposition to any attempts to limit the amount of money American corporations spend to influence the political process. Mitch McConnell listens to singer Jimmy Rose perform "Coal Keeps the Lights On" in his coal-mining home state of Kentucky in 2014. Credit:AP McConnell has said that the "worst day of his political life" was when George W. Bush signed into law a 2002 bill, co-sponsored by Republican senator John McCain, that limited political advertising by lobby groups in the lead-up to an election. He unsuccessfully the challenged the bill in the Supreme Court but was vindicated by the Citizens United verdict of 2010 that allowed corporations and unions to spend as much as they want on political advertising.

Jones criticises McConnell, who has received large donations from the mining industry, for failing to fight for compensation for the victims of black lung disease - a condition especially prevalent in his coal-mining state. "This affects his constituents more than anywhere in the country but he is holding it up," he says. McConnell's obstructionism has led progressives to consider increasingly radical methods to gain political power. If McConnell is going to "play dirty", they argue, then so should Democrats. David Faris, an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University, recently published a book calling for Democrats to split California into seven separate states, grant statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, add extra seats to the Supreme Court and abolish the Senate "filibuster". Faris describes McConnell as "the enemy of progress, surely the chief human impediment to facing down the looming climate crisis and the country's spiralling inequality problem".