Outgoing Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said former President Trump has hurt the Republican Party’s ability to compete and that the “MAGA movement is 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, according to a new biography penned by Michael Tackett of The Associated Press.
These excerpts were first reported Thursday by CNN.
McConnell said Trump 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 … cheated and you don’t deserve to think of yourself as less successful because things haven’t been fair,” McConnell said.
The GOP leader, who is wrapping up his record-long 18-year term as Senate Republican leader, made his comments to an oral historian, and those comments were made available to his biographer.
McConnell lamented Trump’s grip over GOP voters as he takes the party away from its traditional support of free trade, immigration and projecting military power abroad.
“Unfortunately, about half of the Republicans in the country believe whatever he says,” McConnell said.
“I think I’m pretty safe in saying it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days until he leaves on Jan. 20, but the Republicans as well,” he added, speaking at the end of 2020.
Some of McConnell’s strongest comments were focused on Trump’s behavior after he lost the 2020 election, calling him “erratic.” He also criticized his fitness for office.
He described Trump as “not very smart, irascible, nasty, just about every quality you would not want somebody to have.”
The new biography, “The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party,” also describes how strongly the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol impacted McConnell.
He wept when he addressed his staff hours after Trump supporters ransacked Senate offices, telling them: “You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this.”
He called the incident a “shocking occurrence and further evidence of Donald Trump’s complete unfitness for office.”
