Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been keeping a low profile as of late but remains a snake slithering in the tall grass. The man who helped birth the Trump revolution thanks to the great betrayal of November 2014 is now working to put it down this summer in Cleveland. When he’s not mugging for the cameras the underhanded, turtle-faced Kentuckian is at his best behind the scenes whether it be sinking efforts to keep illegals out of the country, cutting secret deals with Barack Obama or in this case, helping to do a Tonya Harding style knee-capping on his party’s own front-runner. There is no dirty D.C. deal that goes down without McConnell’s help and now he has his fingerprints on the dirtiest one of all.

According to Politico “McConnell ‘increasingly optimistic’ about a second ballot in Cleveland”:

Mitch McConnell is “increasingly optimistic that there actually may be a second ballot” at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer, the Senate majority leader told a Kentucky ABC affiliate over the weekend.

If no presidential candidate is able to secure a majority on the first ballot in Cleveland, delegates will vote again — and more delegates became unbound and thus able to vote freely with every subsequent ballot.

That could be bad news for Donald Trump, who has struggled in state after state to secure delegates’ loyalties on a hypothetical second ballot. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, on the other hand, has racked up commitments with a sophisticated, aggressive delegate ground came. And Ohio Gov. John Kasich is banking entirely on winning at a contested convention, as it is mathematically impossible for him to win a majority of delegates.

McConnell has made little secret of his disdain for Trump and Cruz, who has called him a “liar” — but he didn’t tip his hand when asked if he thought a candidate who isn’t currently running could win.

“That’ll be up to the delegates,” the Kentucky senator said, adding, “This notion that there’s some group of people in Washington who can handpick somebody and deliberate — that’s just not true. If there were such a group, I’d probably be a part of it, but there isn’t a group.”

For some reason McConnell – he of the “Kentucky kickback” has always conjured up visions of one of the southern Mafia lawyers in John Grisham’s The Firm and his history as a fixer has bestowed upon him no small amount of clout by virtue of his position. While Ted Cruz is the very epitome of an unprincipled greasy shyster – to the point of being a parody – it is good ole Mitch who revels in being the genteel back-stabber of the Senate, an institution filled to the brim with shady lawyers.