McKinley is no anti-Trump Republican. He opposed both impeachments of the former president and actually voted with Trump during his presidency more often than Mooney did. McKinley has criticized Mooney for votes against funding for Trump’s border wall. He wouldn’t tell me whether he wants Trump to run in 2024, but he said, “If he runs again, and he’s on the ballot, I’ll vote for him.” Trump spent the bulk of his presidency trying, with varying degrees of effort, to negotiate an infrastructure bill with Congress. But when Biden succeeded in winning GOP support for his own effort during his first year in office, his predecessor was furious. On the eve of the House vote in November, McKinley said “a member of the Trump administration”—he wouldn’t name who—called him and told him that if he voted for it, the former president would endorse his opponent in the primary. McKinley was unbowed. “I’m supporting West Virginia,” he told the emissary.
Trump made good on his threat, and a race that once was McKinley’s to lose is now, according to most observers, too close to call. “I agree with President Trump more often than my opponent did,” McKinley said. “But on this one, I think he made the wrong call.” The most powerful people in West Virginia have taken McKinley’s side, but in this state, Trump’s wrath might be all that’s needed to sink him.
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