Talk about throwing your pals under the bus.
Mitch McConnell responded to a forthcoming book revealing old remarks he made about Donald Trump—including that the former president is “stupid” and a “despicable human being”—by noting in a statement that J.D. Vance has said much worse.
“Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what J.D. Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him,” McConnell told the Associated Press. “But we are all on the same team now.”
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The head-scratching statement resurfaced Vance’s old attacks on his running mate less than three weeks before Election Day.
McConnell, of course, was likely referring to Vance’s now-viral Facebook message from 2016 that said Trump was “America’s Hitler.”
“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” Vance wrote to an old pal. “How’s that for discouraging?”
Other not-so-nice comments Vance made about his running mate included him once referring to Trump as “cultural heroin” with a presidential campaign that was promising “the needle in America’s collective vein.”
On another occasion in 2016, Vance told NPR he planned to vote third-party because he “can’t stomach Trump.” If a viable third option wasn’t still in the running, Vance told the radio station he may even “have to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton.”
McConnell, 82, is probably right that his comments—recorded in a series of private “personal oral histories” he handed over to a biographer—aren’t as bad as what Vance had to say eight years ago. But the comments are still eyebrow-raising, especially coming from a politician who’s actively supported a Trump return to the White House this year.
“It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support,” McConnell said of Trump in March.
Not too long ago, however, McConnell was celebrating that Americans denied Trump a second term in 2020.
“They’ve had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him,” McConnell said in one of his diaries, according to the AP.
In another, McConnell reportedly said that Trump was “practically responsible” for the “disgraceful” Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and that he feared Trump’s rhetoric would only worsen after he lost in 2020.
“For a narcissist like [Trump], 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,” McConnell said.
