Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has endorsed Donald Trump for president this year. But in a new book, the powerful Kentucky Republican is quoted after the 2020 election disparaging Trump as a “despicable human being,” “stupid” and “ill-tempered."
Republicans were counting down the days until he left office, McConnell said at the time. He also called the “narcissistic” Trump unfit for office after he incited the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, and the Senate leader sobbed to his staff that day after their lives were put in danger, according to a copy of the book obtained by NBC News.
Those quotes and scenes are depicted in “The Price of Power,” a new book out this month by veteran journalist Michael Tackett, deputy bureau chief of The Associated Press. His reporting is based on almost three decades of private oral histories McConnell shared with Tackett, as well as more than 50 hours of interviews and thousands of McConnell’s personal and official records.
McConnell did not deny his statements about Trump as quoted in the book, when asked about it Thursday. “Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him,” McConnell said in a statement, “but we are all on the same team now.”
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In the book, McConnell, the longest-serving Senate leader in history, gives his unfiltered observations about presidents, House speakers, Cabinet officials, fellow senators and tech leaders. But his most scathing criticism was reserved for Trump.
Some of these remarks were reported earlier Thursday by the AP.
In late December 2020, a month after Joe Biden defeated Trump in the presidential election, McConnell skewered Trump for holding up billions of dollars in Covid relief funds.
“This despicable human being is sitting on this package of relief that the American people desperately need,” McConnell told his oral historian.
McConnell was also worried that Trump’s actions after losing the election — questioning Georgia’s election system and feuding with state officials there — could cost Republicans two Senate seats in the Peach State that same month. Republicans did end up losing both seats — and the Senate majority.
Trump is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered and can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie,” McConnell said at the time.
The GOP leader also said the American people showed “good judgment” in firing Trump in 2020, given his “erratic” behavior making false claims of election fraud and delaying the Covid package.
“I think I’m pretty safe in saying it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days until he leaves on January 20,” McConnell said, “but the Republicans as well.”
An institutionalist who had served for decades in the Senate, McConnell was sickened by what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The insurrectionists were “narcissistic, just like Donald Trump, sitting in the vice president’s chair taking pictures of themselves," Tackett's book quotes him saying. The events were “further evidence of Donald Trump’s complete unfitness for office."
After speaking on the Senate floor after the attack, McConnell addressed his staff, some of whom rode out the attack by barricading themselves in the Capitol, Tackett wrote. McConnell, a former Senate staffer himself, told his staffers how brave they were and that he appreciated them.
“McConnell, a man often characterized as almost soulless and possessing no emotion, started to sob softly, along with many on his staff,” Tackett wrote. “‘You are my staff, and you are my responsibility,’ McConnell told them. ‘You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this.'”
A month later, McConnell voted to acquit Trump in his Jan. 6 impeachment trial, though he called him "practically and morally responsible" for the attack.
In Tackett’s book, McConnell said he was certain that Trump’s actions amounted to an “impeachable offense” but he wrestled with the question of whether a former president could be impeached. Ultimately, McConnell voted to acquit Trump.
McConnell had also been furious at Trump over his racist attacks on McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao, who served as Trump's transportation secretary. The GOP leader said that he could take a punch but that his wife should be off-limits. “I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be criticized by than this sleazeball,” McConnell told Tackett. “So every time he takes a shot at me, I think it’s good for my reputation.”
Trump and McConnell, who is stepping down as the Senate Republican leader this year, have publicly feuded for years. But McConnell endorsed Trump for president earlier this year, saying he always planned to endorse the 2024 GOP nominee. The leader even appeared with Trump during his meeting with Senate Republicans in June just off Capitol Hill.
But less than three weeks before the election, the timing of McConnell’s damning remarks about Trump can’t be helpful to the nominee, who's locked in a neck-and-neck battle with Vice President Kamala Harris.
"The Price of Power," published by Simon & Schuster, will be out Oct. 29, one week before Election Day.
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