McConnell privately called Trump a 'narcissist' and 'despicable human,' biography says
US President Donald Trump speaks alongside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, September 5, 2017. (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell called then-President Donald Trump a "despicable human being" after the 2020 election and was "counting the days" until he left office, according to a new biography slated for release later this month.
Still, McConnell has endorsed Trump’s 2024 run, saying earlier this year "it should come as no surprise" that he would support the Republican party's nominee. He shook Trump’s hand in June when Trump met with GOP senators on Capitol Hill.
McConnell’s brutal assessments of the former president are included in a new biography on McConnell, "The Price of Power," set for release on Oct. 29, a week before Election Day. It’s written by deputy Washington bureau chief of The Associated Press Michael Tackett and based on nearly 30 years of McConnell’s recorded diaries and years of interviews.
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McConnell, 82, the longest-serving Senate leader in history, announced in February that he will step aside as Republican leader after the election but stay in the Senate through the end of his term in 2026.
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His comments about Trump came in the weeks leading up to the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump was actively trying to overturn his loss to Joe Biden. McConnell reportedly feared this would hurt Republicans in two Georgia runoffs and cost them the Senate majority. Democrats won both Georgia races and took control of the Senate.
Privately, he said in his oral history that "it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days" until Trump left office, and 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," McConnell said.
"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."
Even before those Georgia runoffs, McConnell said Trump is "stupid as well as being ill-tempered and can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie."
He called Trump a "despicable human being" when the former president was holding up a COVID-19 aid package that had bipartisan support.
On Jan. 6, McConnell was holed up in a secure location with other congressional leaders, calling Vice President Mike Pence and military officials for reinforcements as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.
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Once the Senate resumed debate and McConnell gave a speech on the Senate floor, he then went to his office to address his staff, some of whom had barricaded themselves in the office as rioters banged on their doors. He started to sob softly as he thanked them, Tackett wrote in the book.
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"You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this," he told them.
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The next month, McConnell gave his harshest public criticism of Trump on the Senate floor, saying he was "practically and morally responsible " for the Jan. 6 attack. Still, McConnell voted to acquit Trump after House Democrats impeached him for inciting the riot.
He also blamed Trump after House Republicans lost their majority in the 2018 midterm elections, Tackett writes. Trump "has every characteristic you would not want a president to have," McConnell said in an oral history at the time, and was "not very smart, irascible, nasty."
In 2022, as Trump continued to criticize McConnell and made racist comments about his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, McConnell told Tackett that "I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be criticized by than this sleazeball."
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"Every time he takes a shot at me, I think it's good for my reputation," McConnell said.
In a statement to the AP on Thursday, McConnell referenced two fellow Republican senators — JD Vance of Ohio, the vice presidential nominee, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both of whom are strong Trump allies after harshly criticizing him during his first run in 2016.
"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 said.
That’s in stark contrast to what he said privately about Trump and some members of his own party: "Unfortunately, about half the Republicans in the country believe whatever he says," McConnell once said about Trump.