Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called his party\u2019s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, a \u201cstupid,\u201d \u201cill-tempered,\u201d and \u201cdespicable human being,\u201d according to his own records.<\/p>\n
McConnell made the withering assessments in a series of private \u201cpersonal oral histories\u201d that he gave to Michael Tackett, the deputy Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press, who has a forthcoming biography about the Kentucky senator called The Price of Power. The AP conveniently reported the book\u2019s juicy details.<\/p>\n
McConnell\u2019s remarks were made after the 2020 election that Trump lost, and the senator was apparently elated to see the backside of the former president, musing, \u201cit\u2019s not just the Democrats who are counting the days\u201d until he leaves office.<\/p>\n
The Senate Republican leader since 2007, he also expressed confidence in the \u201cgood judgment of the American people\u201d for rejecting Trump that year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ve had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him,\u201d he said, in one of his recorded diaries.<\/p>\n
McConnell, 82, announced earlier this year that he will step down as leader at the end of November.<\/p>\n
Despite his private protestations and his public blaming of Trump as \u201cpractically responsible\u201d for the \u201cdisgraceful\u201d Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, McConnell is one of several formerly disaffected Republicans to turn around and endorse the former president this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support,\u201d he said in March.<\/p>\n
That puts him in league with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), two other GOP stalwarts who had variously criticized Trump and later had a come-to-MAGA moment.<\/p>\n
After Trump lost the election and in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, McConnell privately mused about his escalating instability, Tackett\u2019s book will reveal.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor a narcissist like him, that\u2019s 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n