Since leaving office, former President Donald Trump has made no mystery of his desire to exact revenge on Mitch McConnell, by rallying pro-Trump senators to block McConnell from returning to his perch as majority leader. But the ex-president has been tight-lipped about who, exactly, he would want to back as McConnell’s prospective dethroner.
However, in private conversations with close associates over the past several months, at Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere, Trump has batted around a handful of GOP senators’ names in his quest to stick it to the riot-averse “dumb son of a bitch” McConnell. Since at least late last year, Trump has been asking a recurring question.
“Do you think Lindsey could do it?” he has asked advisers, according to two sources who’ve heard him pose this same question at different points over the past four months.
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He was, of course, referring to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who was one of Trump’s preferred golf buddies and confidants on Capitol Hill during his four years in the White House.
The former president’s quest to thwart McConnell’s expected return to power—provided that Republicans win back the Senate in November—is rooted in a long-standing on-again-off-again tiff between the two men, going back to 2016. The ongoing turf battle between McConnell-world and Trumpland is in itself a proxy war, played out against a backdrop of a twice-impeached former president continuing to shape the current anti-democratic, culture war-obsessed iteration of his party at local, state, and national levels.
Most recently, Trump grew furious at McConnell for finally acknowledging that Joe Biden clearly won the 2020 presidential election, and for blaming Trump for instigating the mob violence in Washington, D.C., early last year. Last year, he began frequently referring to McConnell derisively as “Old Crow” in press releases and at political events, a nickname the Kentucky Republican has since embraced and even used in fundraising.
McConnell, who looked past his ire and voted to acquit Trump in his impeachment trial one year ago, has been working behind the scenes in hopes of turning the 2022 election results into proof of Trump’s diminishing influence over the party and conservative movement. Nevertheless, McConnell has already stated that if Trump is the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, he will dutifully support Trump.
So far, both men’s efforts to undercut the other are coming up short.
On Trump’s end, the ex-president—who still stands tall as the leader of the Republican Party and as the current favorite to win its 2024 presidential nomination, should he seek it—has been working the phones for months, calling up senators, GOP Senate hopefuls, and assorted MAGA figures alike to gauge interest and urge action on stopping his expected coronation for majority leader and “screwing over Mitch McConnell,” in the words of a person who was on the receiving end of one such phone call.
At this stage, a handful of visible right-wing primary contenders, such as Eric Greitens in Missouri and Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska, have pledged to vote to dump McConnell should they end up on Capitol Hill. But according to three people familiar with the matter, Trump’s flurry of calls and meetings looking for ways to expel McConnell from a leadership position have yielded unimpressive results, so far.
“If I’m being honest, it’s not going well,” one of the sources, who has tried to help the ex-president on his vengeful quest, conceded, noting that there is scant appetite among Senate Republicans, and among many top-tier conservative candidates, to go along with this. Various Trump allies and lawmakers have already told the former president that it would be a bad idea to try to oust McConnell, which would risk sparking further intra-party tumult at this point in the Biden era.
It also doesn’t help that Graham, one of the senators on Trump’s shortlist of preferred leaders, says he isn’t even interested in taking Minority Leader McConnell’s former job, and literally laughed off the idea when asked about Trump’s proposal for his future.
Reached by phone on Monday, Graham said, “I know [Trump] is not pleased with Sen. McConnell,” but claimed that in Graham and Trump’s conversations, “he has not gone down that road with me.”
Asked if he’d want to assume the leadership post, Graham simply replied, “not me” and “no,” while audibly chortling on the call.
Still, over the years, even at moments when it seemed Graham was angling to ditch the 45th U.S. president—particularly right after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot— the senator has consistently found his way back to protecting and coddling Trump.
“If you want to be a Republican leader in the House or the Senate, you have to have a working relationship with President Donald Trump. He’s the most consequential Republican since Ronald Reagan. It’s his nomination if he wants it, and I think he’ll get re-elected in 2024,” Graham said last month on the Fox News program hosted by Sean Hannity, another longtime Trump adviser.
The senator then laid out his conditions for backing McConnell, should the GOP retake the Senate in the 2022 elections: “I like Sen. McConnell. He worked well with President Trump…[but] I’m not going to vote for anybody for leader of the Senate as a Republican unless they can prove to me that they can advocate an ‘American First’ agenda and have a working relationship with President Trump—because if you can’t do that, you will fail.”
As a reward for Graham’s continued fealty, Trump repeatedly dinged his golf buddy in public, including early this month when he called Graham a “RINO” after the Republican lawmaker gently defected from Trump’s pledge to pardon Jan. 6 rioters, if he again wins the White House.
But as Trump and his diehard supporters try to nudge the GOP farther down the path to open, intra-party rebellions, some of the ex-president’s closest lieutenants and fellow travelers are instead pleading for a détente of sorts.
“Republicans have a great chance to win this fall—and we ought to focus on the Democrats,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who informally advises Trump and has also been counseling top House Republicans ahead of the 2022 midterms, succinctly told The Daily Beast on Monday, when asked about the Trump-McConnell feud.
A Trump spokesman did not respond to requests for comment on this story. A McConnell rep declined to comment on Monday. However, in an interview with the Washington Examiner published earlier this month, the Senate minority leader seemed to acknowledge the former president’s quest and its level of success.
“Have you found one?” he said, after reporter David Drucker asked if McConnell was concerned about a challenger sparked by Trump’s thirst for a full-blown revolt against him.
After Drucker noted no Senate Republican had volunteered, McConnell said, “That’s the answer to your question.”
