A new biography of Mitch McConnell drawing on his diaries and oral histories has some interesting tidbits:
The comments about Trump quoted in the book came in the weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Trump was then actively trying to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden. McConnell feared this would hurt Republicans in two Georgia runoffs and cost them the Senate majority. Democrats won both races.
Publicly, McConnell had congratulated Biden after the Electoral College certified the presidential vote and the senator warned his fellow Republicans not to challenge the results. But he did not say much else. Privately, he said in his oral history that “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump left office, and that Trump’s behavior “only underscores the good judgment of the American people. They’ve had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him.”
“And for a narcissist like him,” McConnell continued, “that’s been really hard to take, and so his behavior since the election has been even worse, by far, than it was before, because he has no filter now at all.”
Before those Georgia runoffs, McConnell said Trump is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered and can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie.”
Trump was also holding up a coronavirus aid package at the time, despite bipartisan support. “This despicable human being,” McConnell said in his oral history, “is sitting on this package of relief that the American people desperately need.”
On Jan. 6, soon after he made those comments, McConnell was holed up in a secure location with other congressional leaders, calling Vice President Mike Pence and military officials for reinforcements as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. Once the Senate resumed debate over the certification of Biden’s victory, McConnell said in a speech on the floor that “this failed attempt to obstruct the Congress, this failed insurrection, only underscores how crucial the task before us is for our republic.”
McConnell then went to his office to address his staff, some of whom had barricaded themselves in the office as rioters banged on their doors. He started to sob softly as he thanked them, Tackett writes.
“You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this,” he told them.
The next month, McConnell gave his harshest public criticism of Trump on the Senate floor, saying he was “ practically and morally responsible ” for the Jan. 6 attack. Still, McConnell voted to acquit Trump after House Democrats impeached him for inciting the riot.
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McConnell also had doubts about Trump from the start. Just after Trump was elected in 2016, as Congress was certifying the election, McConnell told Biden, then the outgoing vice president, that he thought Trump could be trouble, Tackett writes.
The book channels McConnell’s inner thoughts during some of the biggest moments after Trump took office, as McConnell held his tongue and as the two men repeatedly fought and made up.
In 2017, as Trump publicly criticized McConnell for the Senate’s failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Trump and McConnell had a heated argument on the phone. Weeks went by with no contact. Then Trump invited McConnell to the White House and called a joint news conference without telling him first. McConnell said the event went fine, and “it’s not hard to look more knowledgeable than Donald Trump at a press conference.”
After the passage of a $1.5 billion tax overhaul that same year, McConnell said, “All of a sudden, I’m Trump’s new best friend.”
He blamed Trump after House Republicans lost their majority in the 2018 midterm elections, Tackett writes. Trump ”has every characteristic you would not want a president to have,” McConnell said in an oral history at the time, and was “not very smart, irascible, nasty.”
In 2022, as Trump continued to criticize McConnell and made racist comments about his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, McConnell told Tackett that “I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be criticized by than this sleazeball.”
“Every time he takes a shot at me, I think it’s good for my reputation,” McConnell said.
Also in 2022, McConnell said in his oral history that Trump’s behavior since losing the election had been “beyond erratic” as he kept pushing false allegations of voter fraud. “Unfortunately, about half the Republicans in the country believe whatever he says,” McConnell said.
By 2024, McConnell had again endorsed Trump. He felt he had to if he were to continue to play a role in shaping the nation’s agenda.
“It was the price he paid for power,” Tackett writes.
He is a despicable piece of work, a total sell-out to everything America stands for. And he does it knowing what harm it causes.
Get a load of this “statement” to the AP about this story:
“Whatever 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,” McConnell said.
He’s more responsible for that atrocity we call a Supreme Court than Trump is and he will go down in history as one of the worst congressional leaders American has ever produced. He’s 82 years old and knows what Trump is. But he backs him anyway to maintain power, which is literally all that really matters to him. All his “private” acknowledgements of Trump’s unfitness show that he’s an even more loathesome creature than we knew.