“That’s, like, parallel-universe shit,” a furious North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis exclaimed to reporters Thursday. “That didn’t happen.”

Tillis was referring to a report Wednesday night, from Punchbowl News, that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was backing away from a deal for enhanced border security with additional aid for Ukraine. The final product of those negotiations has supposedly been coming any minute now for about a week. McConnell, the Senate GOP’s most steadfast supporter of funding Ukraine’s defense against Russia, has been pushing the effort.

What threw Tillis and other McConnell allies into a fit about the reporting wasn’t just the idea that McConnell had turned, but that he had done so out of deference to Donald Trump. According to Punchbowl’s reporting, McConnell, during a Republican conference lunch on Wednesday, said that the “politics on this have changed,” and noted that Trump—whom he referred to as “the nominee”—is campaigning on fixing a broken border.

“We don’t want to do anything to undermine him,” McConnell reportedly said.

McConnell’s office didn’t say anything to deny the reporting. But other GOP senators suggested that his comments had been misinterpreted. He wasn’t throwing in the towel on the deal, which lead negotiators Sens. James Lankford, Chris Murphy, and Kyrsten Sinema say they’re putting the finishing touches on. And he wasn’t “bowing” to Trump, who has been hectoring senators and House members to reject anything short of “PERFECT.”

What Republicans didn’t deny, though, was that McConnell had explained how difficult the politics of the situation had become. And no one would contradict him on that.

Lankford, the poor soul tapped with negotiating the deal for Republicans, referred to McConnell’s remarks at the meeting as an “elephant-in-the-room conversation,” as in “everybody in the room knows this,” so McConnell was just saying it “out loud.”

So what, precisely,........

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