Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell listens to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on July 20. | Doug Mills (Pool)/Getty Images

Does Mitch McConnell want Trump to be a one-term president?

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in October 2010.

The unemployment rate was 9.4 percent that month. The need for stimulus was desperate. But led by McConnell, Republicans blocked Democrats’ every attempt at further support. The GOP didn’t have a better plan for restarting the economy, but they didn’t need one. The belief, then, was that relentless opposition reflected the strategic incentives of the minority party. Obama and the Democrats carried the burden of governance, and would bear the blame for failure. The red wave in the 2010 election seemed to prove McConnell’s