A brand new book yet to be released says that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell privately tore into former President Donald Trump and broke down into sobs following the events that transpired on Jan. 6, 2021. McConnell, 82, a Kentucky Republican, ripped Trump, calling him “stupid,” “ill-tempered,” a “narcissist,” and a “despicable human being,” in secret close to the end of his administration, according to a preview released from the book “The Price of Power.”
Check out more from The New York Post:
“It’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump’s White House departure, McConnell told associates in confidence, per the AP. “[Trump’s conduct] 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.”
“For a narcissist like him,” McConnell allegedly prattled on, “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 preview then says that McConnell had been irritated with Trump for making claims about the election being stolen ahead of the runoff race in Georgia. The GOP ended up losing that race and also losing control of the Senate as a result.
“This despicable human being,” McConnell later fumed about Trump, accusing him of delaying a COVID-19 relief package at the time. “[Trump] is sitting on this package of relief that the American people desperately need.” Publicly, McConnell split from Trump during the certification of his 2020 electoral defeat, warning against taking “a poisonous path where only the winners of election actually accept the results.”
Several weeks later, despite opposing the second effort to impeach Trump, McConnell held the former president “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events” of Jan. 6, 2021. But none of the Kentucky sage’s public rebukes of Trump were nearly as brutal as the account detailed in the forthcoming book, authored by the AP’s Washington bureau chief Michael Tackett and slated for release on Oct. 29.
After all of the rioters were cleared from the Capitol and lawmakers were able to leave their secured location, the senator from Kentucky spoke with the members of his staff and, according to the book, “started to sob softly.”
“You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this,” McConnell went on to tell them. When he was confronted about the remarks contained in the tome, McConnell pointed to the previous comments made by current Trump supporters like his vice presidential pick, JD Vance and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina that were critical of Trump at that time.
“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,” McConnell went on to say in a statement obtained by The Post.
Throughout his time in Republican leadership, McConnell gained a reputation for parsing his words very carefully and saying little, especially when questioned by the press. Tackett got a peek into the enigmatic pol’s mindset by tapping into nearly three decades’ worth of his recorded diaries as well as from interviews with him. McConnell’s tenure in the Senate, which began in 1985, spanned a dramatic transformation within the Republican Party from the Reagan era into Trump’s brand of populist politics. Using his bully pulpit, McConnell has at times lamented some of the major changes within the party, particularly the lurch toward isolationism.
And while McConnell isn’t necessarily a big fan of Trump’s, Trump is not all that into McConnell either. It’s a tense relationship that has been anything but cordial, though it seems the two men most certainly recognize the political importance of being allied with the other. In the end, it seems pragmatism won the day.
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