Will Sen. Mitch McConnell sink another Donald Trump cabinet nominee?

When Donald Trump’s trial balloon to name Matt Gaetz attorney general popped after just eight days, Mitch McConnell reacted with his trademark restraint.

“I think that was appropriate,” the lame duck GOP leader said of Gaetz’s withdrawal.

McConnell never publicly outlined his opposition to the aberrant former Florida congressman becoming the nation’s chief law enforcement officer — because he didn’t have to. Kentucky’s senior senator was among a cadre of GOP senators who privately locked arms to convey that Gaetz couldn’t get to 50 Senate votes, even with an incoming Republican majority. And MAGA fans knew it.

“You gotta give the devil its due,” Steve Bannon told The Dispatch, referring to McConnell, before lamenting to Puck, “What’s going to hold us back is Mitch McConnell.”

Now, as Pete Hegseth’s nomination for secretary of defense teeters on the brink on Capitol Hill amid allegations of sexual misconduct, an open question in Washington is how far McConnell will go to preserve the Senate’s role to “advise” on the president-elect nominees and which among them looks most vulnerable to a quiet killshot from the “Old Crow.”

“I think he will exercise his vote and will bring others along with him to selectively block the very worst of the Trump nominees. By that I mean the most dangerous ones,” said Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institute who conversed with McConnell on the floor during Trump’s first impeachment trial.

If Hegseth falls similarly to Gaetz, McConnell won’t have to do more than watch.

Given his traditional posture and emphasis on national security, some observers believe Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination to be Director of National Intelligence could be the next most likely Trump pick to fall into McConnell’s crosshairs.

Gabbard, a former Democrat and Hawaii congresswoman, holds an isolationist worldview, expressing skepticism about U.S. involvement in Ukraine and declaring in 2019 that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.”

McConnell, an old-fashioned hawk, has been steadfast in declaring the Ukrainian cause a strategic interest to U.S. national security and has condemned Assad as a brutal “butcher who has killed his own people,” supporting military strikes to force the dictator’s removal.

McConnell has refrained from publicly remarking on Gabbard, but other Republican senators close to the Kentuckian have indicated they have many questions for Gabbard and would request a full background check.

“Each of these nominees needs to come before the Senate and go through the process and be vetted,” McConnell said at an American Enterprise Institute event last month.

Carrie Cordero, a senior fellow and general counsel at the Center for a New American Security, said she hoped the scrutiny of Gabbard would focus on her qualifications to run the central coordinating intelligence body rather than an examination of her ideology.

“It’s unclear what her qualifications are to lead DNI…She does not have intelligence experience, neither has she had any federal government management experience. She did not sit on the Intelligence Committees (in Congress),” said Cordero.

Still, considering the general presumption of deference to the incoming president, Cordero cautioned not to expect McConnell and allied senators to vote against several of Trump’s nominations, regardless of their personal reservations about any particular individual. It means to expect McConnell to be surgical about his opposition.

“They’re going to focus on which are unacceptable on their face. Gaetz was one. Perhaps there will be one or two more that several members cannot accept,” Cordero said.

It takes a minimum of four Republican senators willing to object to tank a Trump nominee, assuming all Democrats are opposed. But rather than suffer the embarrassment of a failed vote on the Senate floor, Cabinet nominees are traditionally pressured to withdraw their candidacies ahead of time.

If McConnell wants Gabbard — or any other nominee to go down — his odds of finding three willing senators to join him are favorable. Two of the most likely are Sens. Susan Collins, who represents the blue state of Maine and Lisa Murkowski, who personally dislikes Trump and depends on Democratic votes for re-election in Alaska.

“The water is safe to oppose nominees,” said journalist Mark Halperin on his 2Way Tonight program on Tuesday. “Everybody kind of assumes you start with Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski voting no and then maybe Mitch McConnell voting no, so you’ve got to hold everybody else.”

One McConnell ally stressed that the leader still believes it is imperative for the president to have his national security team in place on Day 1 and was dismayed by how Democratic leader Chuck Schumer stonewalled Trump’s first term nominations.

“I think based on his career of caution and party loyalty he will be selective— so don’t expect him to vote, or quietly whip votes, against every single objectionable nominee,” Eisen said.

But if one or more nominees falls in the coming weeks, Trump loyalists will likely figure out a way to blame McConnell, whether he’s culpable or not.

“I give credit to Mitch McConnell. We ran him out of there as a leader after the Ukraine vote last year, but John Thune is his creation,” Bannon told Puck. “We lost that battle [for Senate Majority Leader], and then we lost Gaetz.

“So it’s pretty obvious that McConnell has staying power, and we have to confront that. We have to confront it now, because they’re not going to agree with President Trump’s program going forward. Trust me.”