Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2020 said then-president Donald Trump was a \u201cdespicable human being,\u201d a \u201cnarcissist,\u201d \u201cstupid\u201d and \u201cill-tempered,\u201d according to excerpts from a new biography of the Republican leader by the Associated Press\u2019s deputy Washington bureau chief.<\/p>\n
According to the AP, which reported on excerpts of \u201cThe Price of Power,\u201d by longtime Washington reporter and Deputy Washington Bureau Chief Michael Tackett, McConnell made the comments in the weeks before the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, in which a mob of Trump supporters attempted to stop the affirmation of President Joe Biden\u2019s win in the 2020 election.<\/p>\n
As The Washington Post and several other news outlets have reported, McConnell has repeatedly \u2014 and privately \u2014 derided Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6 assault, denouncing him for his role in fomenting the attack. Yet after the House impeached Trump on a charge of \u201cincitement of insurrection\u201d and a Senate trial in February 2021, McConnell made no effort to rally Republicans to convict Trump and voted to acquit the former president.<\/p>\n
And McConnell endorsed Trump this past March, saying it was \u201cabundantly clear\u201d that the former president had earned \u201cthe requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tackett\u2019s book will be released one week before Election Day, on Oct. 29. It is based on nearly three decades of McConnell\u2019s recorded diaries and years of interviews that Tackett conducted with McConnell.<\/p>\n
At the time McConnell made the comments, Trump and his allies were working to overturn the results of the election, falsely claiming that the election had been fraudulent in key states including Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia. Per the AP, McConnell was afraid that Trump\u2019s efforts would hurt the two Senate Republican candidates running in runoff races in Georgia \u2014 races that would dictate who won the majority in the Senate.<\/p>\n
McConnell reportedly said \u2014 before the Georgia runoff races \u2014 that Trump is \u201cstupid\u201d and \u201cill-tempered.\u201d Trump, he added, \u201ccan\u2019t even figure out where his own best interests lie.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ultimately, both Georgia Republicans lost, and Democrats grabbed the Senate majority.<\/p>\n
And while McConnell reportedly worried about Trump\u2019s actions after the election, publicly he did not do much to stop a wave of election denialism that continues to prevail in the Republican Party \u2014 other than publicly acknowledging Biden\u2019s victory and his warning to Republican colleagues not to participate in election denialism.<\/p>\n
Per Tackett, however, McConnell privately said that \u201cit\u2019s not just the Democrats who are counting the days\u201d until Trump left office. McConnell appeared hopeful that the American public had had \u201cenough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFor a narcissist like him \u2026 that\u2019s been really hard to take,\u201d McConnell said. \u201cAnd so his behavior since the election has been even worse, by far, than it was before, because he has no filter now at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to the book, some of McConnell\u2019s staffers barricaded themselves in their office as rioters stormed the building on Jan. 6. After the attack, McConnell sobbed softly as he spoke to his office staff, thanking them for their actions that day.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this,\u201d he told them, Tackett writes.<\/p>\n
The comments are an escalation of McConnell\u2019s public criticisms of Trump in the wake of the attack. On the Senate floor in February 2021, McConnell laid the blame for the attack on the former president, whom he said was \u201cpractically and morally responsible\u201d for the insurrection.<\/p>\n
And he told Jonathan Martin, a reporter and co-author of \u201cThis Will Not Pass,\u201d that he felt \u201cexhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself\u201d after his actions on Jan. 6.<\/p>\n
McConnell also called Trump a \u201cdespicable human being\u201d when he held up a bipartisan spending package meant to offer relief and government funding amid the coronavirus pandemic. Trump, McConnell said, \u201cis sitting on this package of relief that the American people desperately need.\u201d<\/p>\n
McConnell\u2019s wife, Elaine Chao, served as transportation secretary in the Trump administration, resigning after the Jan. 6 attack. Trump repeatedly mocked her with a series of racist attacks aimed at her and other Asian Americans, calling her \u201cCoco Chow,\u201d and saying of McConnell, \u201cHer husband, the Old Broken Crow, is VERY close to Biden, the Democrats, and, of course, China.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Trump campaign had no immediate response to the McConnell criticism.<\/p>\n
McConnell\u2019s office issued a statement, saying, \u201cWhatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vance, Trump\u2019s running mate, once called him a \u201cmoral disaster,\u201d and possibly \u201cAmerica\u2019s Hitler.\u201d In 2016, Graham questioned Trump\u2019s mental fitness and said he shouldn\u2019t be commander in chief.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2020 said then-president Donald Trump was a \u201cdespicable human being,\u201d a \u201cnarcissist,\u201d \u201cstupid\u201d and \u201cill-tempered,\u201d according to excerpts from a new biography of the Republican leader by the Associated Press\u2019s deputy Washington bureau chief. According to the AP, which reported on excerpts of \u201cThe Price of Power,\u201d by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11260,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}