'Done a lot of damage': McConnell unleashes on 'sleazeball' Trump and his supporters

24 October 2024

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) isn't holding back on how he feels about former President Donald Trump and his supporters in his forthcoming biography.

When Associated Press journalist Michael Tackett interviewed the outgoing Senate Republican leader for his book, "The Price of Power," McConnell made several jabs at the ex-president and the GOP at large. CNN reported that the Kentucky Republican called the MAGA movement "completely wrong," and said that two-term Republican President Ronald Reagan "wouldn't recognize" the modern GOP in the wake of Trump's ascendancy.

"I think Trump was the biggest factor in changing the Republican Party from what Ronald Reagan viewed and he wouldn’t recognize today," McConnell said, adding that Trump has "done a lot of damage to our party’s image and our ability to compete."

"Trump is appealing to people who haven’t been as successful as other people and providing an excuse for that, that these more successful people have somehow been cheated, and you don’t deserve to think of yourself as less successful because things haven’t been fair," he continued.

Despite McConnell's attacks on the ex-president, he continues to support him in the November election. Earlier this summer, McConnell urged his fellow Republicans in Congress to unite behind Trump, warning that Vice President Kamala Harris winning the presidency would be Republicans' "worst nightmare." The Senate GOP leader has said that Harris' calls to eliminate the filibuster would signal that "it's over" for Republicans. He argued that if the obstructionist tool was no longer in place that Democrats could grant statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., giving them four new Democratic senators "in perpetuity."

After the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, McConnell condemned Trump from the Senate floor for his attempts to overturn the election. However, when the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives impeached him for the second time, McConnell held off on supporting his conviction in the Senate. His influence could have arguably swayed the result, as multiple Republicans voted with Democrats to convict — which would have permanently prevented Trump from seeking the presidency again.

Still, McConnell insisted to Tackett that he was "not at all conflicted" about Trump's actions on January 6 being "an impeachable offense." He went on to say that Trump "urging an insurrection and people attacking the Capitol as a direct result … is about as close to an impeachable offense as you can imagine, with the possible exception of maybe being an agent for another country."

"I don’t know whether you can make a conclusive argument that he’s directly responsible for them storming the Capitol, but I think it’s not in dispute that those folks would not have been here in the first place if he had not asked them to come and to disrupt the actual acceptance of the outcome of the election," he added.

CNN further reported that the outgoing minority leader called the former president a "sleazeball" and a "narcissist," as well as "stupid" and "ill-tempered." He went on to describe the 2024 GOP presidential nominee as "not very smart, irascible, nasty, just about every quality you would not want somebody to have."

Despite McConnell's critique, he was instrumental in confirming hundreds of Trump's nominees to the federal judiciary, including Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. And according to FiveThirtyEight, he voted in line with Trump's policies more than 91% of the time.

Click here to read CNN's report in full.

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