Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2020 said then-president Donald Trump was a “despicable human being,” a “narcissist,” “stupid” and “ill-tempered,” according to excerpts from a new biography of the Republican leader by the Associated Press’s deputy Washington bureau chief.
According to the AP, which reported on excerpts of “The Price of Power,” by longtime Washington reporter and Deputy Washington Bureau Chief Michael Tackett, McConnell made the comments in the weeks before the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, in which a mob of Trump supporters attempted to stop the affirmation of President Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election.
As The Washington Post and several other news outlets have reported, McConnell has repeatedly — and privately — derided Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6 assault, denouncing him for his role in fomenting the attack. Yet after the House impeached Trump on a charge of “incitement of insurrection” and a Senate trial in February 2021, McConnell made no effort to rally Republicans to convict Trump and voted to acquit the former president.
And McConnell endorsed Trump this past March, saying it was “abundantly clear” that the former president had earned “the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States.”
Tackett’s book will be released one week before Election Day, on Oct. 29. It is based on nearly three decades of McConnell’s recorded diaries and years of interviews that Tackett conducted with McConnell.
At the time McConnell made the comments, Trump and his allies were working to overturn the results of the election, falsely claiming that the election had been fraudulent in key states including Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia. Per the AP, McConnell was afraid that Trump’s efforts would hurt the two Senate Republican candidates running in runoff races in Georgia — races that would dictate who won the majority in the Senate.
McConnell reportedly said — before the Georgia runoff races — that Trump is “stupid” and “ill-tempered.” Trump, he added, “can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie.”
Ultimately, both Georgia Republicans lost, and Democrats grabbed the Senate majority.
And while McConnell reportedly worried about Trump’s actions after the election, publicly he did not do much to stop a wave of election denialism that continues to prevail in the Republican Party — other than publicly acknowledging Biden’s victory and his warning to Republican colleagues not to participate in election denialism.
Per Tackett, however, McConnell privately said that “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump left office. McConnell appeared hopeful that the American public had had “enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him.”
“For a narcissist like him … that’s been really hard to take,” McConnell said. “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.”
According to the book, some of McConnell’s staffers barricaded themselves in their office as rioters stormed the building on Jan. 6. After the attack, McConnell sobbed softly as he spoke to his office staff, thanking them for their actions that day.
“You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this,” he told them, Tackett writes.
The comments are an escalation of McConnell’s public criticisms of Trump in the wake of the attack. On the Senate floor in February 2021, McConnell laid the blame for the attack on the former president, whom he said was “practically and morally responsible” for the insurrection.
And he told Jonathan Martin, a reporter and co-author of “This Will Not Pass,” that he felt “exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself” after his actions on Jan. 6.
McConnell also called Trump a “despicable human being” when he held up a bipartisan spending package meant to offer relief and government funding amid the coronavirus pandemic. Trump, McConnell said, “is sitting on this package of relief that the American people desperately need.”
McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, served as transportation secretary in the Trump administration, resigning after the Jan. 6 attack. Trump repeatedly mocked her with a series of racist attacks aimed at her and other Asian Americans, calling her “Coco Chow,” and saying of McConnell, “Her husband, the Old Broken Crow, is VERY close to Biden, the Democrats, and, of course, China.”
The Trump campaign had no immediate response to the McConnell criticism.
McConnell’s office issued a statement, saying, “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.”
Vance, Trump’s running mate, once called him a “moral disaster,” and possibly “America’s Hitler.” In 2016, Graham questioned Trump’s mental fitness and said he shouldn’t be commander in chief.