While McConnell was initially unenthused by Trump‘s candidacy, he quickly got on board when he read the populist writing on the wall and realized he wanted to be on the “winning” team regardless of whether or not that meant the country would lose. As Mayer recounts, in the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign, “McConnell gave more assistance to Trump than many knew,” including effectively stonewalling the Obama administration’s attempts to alert Congress about the evidence that Russia was attempting to interfere with the election in order to help Trump. “I don’t know for sure why he did it,” former national security adviser Susan Rice told Mayer. “But my guess, particularly with the benefit of hindsight, is that he thought” calling out Russia “would be detrimental to Trump—so he delayed and deflected. It’s disgraceful.”

That, of course, was just the beginning of the unholy alliance between Trump and McConnell, the latter of whom has reportedly called the former “nuts” and likened him to Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court Justice whose bid for U.S. senate was derailed by allegations he had a thing for teenage girls—charges McConnell apparently saw no reason to bring up in public and which his spokesman denies (as does Moore). After spending nearly all of Barack Obama’s two terms in office trying to bury the Affordable Care Act in a shallow grave, McConnell saw Trump‘s presidency as a renewed opportunity to take away people’s health care and then some, including a little-noticed attempt to cut approximately $1 billion in annual funding from the Prevention and Public Health Fund at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which provides “grants to states for detecting and responding to infectious-disease outbreaks, among other things.” Thanks to John McCain, McConnell and his brethren were unsuccessful, but according to Jeff Levi, a professor of public health at George Washington University, one result of their efforts is that many of the people who lack insurance—of which there are a lot!—“will likely avoid getting tested and treated for COVID-19, because they fear the costs.”

While McConnell has unsurprisingly earned the ire of people like former Democratic Majority leader Harry Reid, who told Mayer “Mitch and the Republicans…stand mute no matter what Trump does. They have lost their souls,” a number of longtime conservatives have also turned against him, disgusted by the idea that there is literally nothing Trump can do that will get McConnell to flip, including, seemingly, presiding over the deaths of thousands of Americans.