A new biography of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) revealed some of the Senate leader’s unfiltered frustrations with former President Donald Trump.
Michael Tackett, deputy Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press, will release The Price of Power just one week before the election. The book details McConnell’s relationship with the former president, much of it negative, drawing on diary entries and interviews. It outlines some of the harshest rhetoric McConnell has used against Trump, all of it private until now.
The harshest remarks came after the Jan. 6 riot, the lowest point of their relationship, according to excerpts published by the Associated Press.
McConnell said after the riot that “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump left office and that his 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, 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,” the Senate leader added.
Trump’s hesitance to leave office was cause for concern for McConnell, who feared it would cost Republicans in two Georgia runoffs. Before the elections, he said Trump was “stupid as well as being ill-tempered and can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie.”
During a fight over a COVID-19 aid bill in December 2020, McConnell derided Trump as a “despicable human being.”
He blamed Trump for the Republican losses in the 2018 midterm elections, saying Trump ”has every characteristic you would not want a president to have” and that he was “not very smart, irascible, nasty.”
In a statement, McConnell, who endorsed Trump in 2024, sought to distance himself from his comments.
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“Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what J.D. Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now,” he said.
Trump and McConnell have a famously tempestuous public relationship, frequently fighting and then making up. The two are on the upswing, buoyed by the Kentucky Republican’s endorsement of the former president.