Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called his party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, a “stupid,” “ill-tempered,” and “despicable human being,” according to his own records.
McConnell made the withering assessments in a series of private “personal oral histories” that he gave to Michael Tackett, the deputy Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press, who has a forthcoming biography about the Kentucky senator called The Price of Power. The AP conveniently reported the book’s juicy details.
McConnell’s remarks were made after the 2020 election that Trump lost, and the senator was apparently elated to see the backside of the former president, musing, “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until he leaves office.
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The Senate Republican leader since 2007, he also expressed confidence in the “good judgment of the American people” for rejecting Trump that year.
“They’ve had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him,” he said, in one of his recorded diaries.
McConnell, 82, announced earlier this year that he will step down as leader at the end of November.
Despite his private protestations and his public blaming of Trump as “practically responsible” for the “disgraceful” Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, McConnell is one of several formerly disaffected Republicans to turn around and endorse the former president this year.
“It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support,” he said in March.
That puts him in league with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), two other GOP stalwarts who had variously criticized Trump and later had a come-to-MAGA moment.
After Trump lost the election and in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, McConnell privately mused about his escalating instability, Tackett’s book will reveal.
“For a narcissist like him, 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,” he said.
