McConnell Called Trump ‘Stupid’ and ‘Despicable’ After 2020 Election: Book

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called former President Donald Trump “stupid” and “despicable” after the 2020 election, according to a forthcoming biography about the Kentucky Republican.

On October 29, one week before this year’s election, Michael Tackett, deputy Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press, will release a biography on McConnell called The Price of Power.

A sneak peek of the book details how McConnell saw Trump, the current GOP presidential nominee, in the wake of his election loss to Joe Biden. McConnell said Trump was “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” a “despicable human being” and a “narcissist.”

The new biography is based on almost three decades of McConnell’s recorded diaries and years of interviews with the senator.

McConnell’s comments came weeks before the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Trump was contesting the 2020 election results, claiming without evidence that the election was stolen from him via widespread voter fraud. McConnell feared this would hurt Republicans in two Georgia runoff elections, costing them the Senate majority. Democrats won both races, and the party took control of the upper chamber.

“It’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump left office, McConnell said in his oral history. He also said that Trump’s behavior “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.”

“And for a narcissist like him,” McConnell continued, “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.”

McConnell said before the Georgia runoffs that Trump is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered and can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie.”

The senator also criticized Trump for holding up a bipartisan COVID-19 aid package at the time. “This despicable human being,” McConnell said, “is sitting on this package of relief that the American people desperately need.”

After a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capital in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, in a failed attempt at preventing Congress from certifying the 2020 election, McConnell said in February 2021 that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the events of that day. However, he still voted to acquit Trump after the House impeached him for inciting the riot.

Newsweek reached out to Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, via email for comment Thursday mid-morning.

Trump and McConnell’s animosity toward each other is already well documented, but these private comments coming to light with the new book are his most brutal description of the former president.

For his part, Trump called McConnell a “dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack” in February 2021.

Nevertheless, McConnell endorsed Trump for president in March.

“It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States,” he said at the time. “It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.”

McConnell told the AP Thursday, “Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what [Ohio Senator] JD Vance, [South Carolina Senator] Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now.”

Vance, the GOP vice presidential nominee, and Graham are staunch Trump allies, though they harshly criticized him during his first presidential run in 2016.

McConnell, the longest-serving Senate leader in history, announced in February that he would step down after the upcoming election and finish his term, which ends in 2027.

This article includes reporting from The Associated Press.