Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell shares his true feelings about Donald Trump in an upcoming biography, calling the former president a “sleazeball,” a “narcissist” and claiming he is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered.”
Trump is “not very smart, irascible, nasty, just about every quality you would not want somebody to have,” McConnell told Associated Press reporter Michael Tackett for the upcoming biography The Price of Power, an early copy of which was obtained by CNN.
McConnell, who has nonetheless endorsed Trump for president, blasted Trump’s entire MAGA movement in interviews with Tackett, calling it “completely wrong.”
“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 the former president 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 said.
McConnell gave Tackett access to his personal archive, including an oral history he has been recording since 1995. At the time of Trump’s election loss in 2020, McConnell told an oral historian that Trump was “erratic” and that “half the Republicans in the country believe whatever he says.”
“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, but the Republicans as well,” he said.
The book also includes an inside look into McConnell’s decision to vote to acquit Trump during the second impeachment trial, which centered on Trump’s alleged involvement in encouraging the Capitol riot.
“I’m not at all conflicted about whether what the president did is an impeachable offense. I think it is. 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,” he said, according to the biography.
“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,” McConnell added.
The new reporting also indicates McConnell cried while addressing his staff immediately after the attack on the Capitol
“You are my staff, and you are my responsibility,” he told them. “You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this.”
The longtime Republican Senate leader called the rioters who broke into the Senate chamber “narcissistic, just like Donald Trump, sitting in the vice president’s chair taking pictures of themselves.”
He called it a “shocking occurrence” and suggested the incident provided “further evidence of Donald Trump’s complete unfitness for office.”
McConnell stood by his comments in the book in a statement to CNN.
“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,” he said.