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- Mitch McConnell privately tore into Donald Trump, calling him a “despicable human being.”
- The top Senate Republican made the comments during oral history interviews that he disclosed to his biographer.
- McConnell says his old criticisms don’t matter now since he has endorsed Trump.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says it doesn’t really matter that he viciously tore into former President Donald Trump in previously unpublished interviews because Trump’s own running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, has said even harsher things.
“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 in a statement to the Associated Press.
McConnell privately said Trump was a “despicable human being” and a “narcissist” whose character was antithetical to everything a president should be. The longtime top Senate Republican gave journalist Michael Tackett access to years of private oral history interviews as Tackett wrote his forthcoming McConnell biography, “The Price of Power.“
In one interview shortly after the January 6 Capitol riot, McConnell said Trump was so self-centered that he couldn’t handle losing the 2020 election.
“And for a narcissist like him,” McConnell said, “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.”
After Republicans lost the House in the 2018 midterms, McConnell blamed Trump.
He “has every characteristic you would not want a president to have,” McConnell said in an oral history at the time.
McConnell and Trump have long had a tense relationship. But they were able to work together, most notably on enshrining a conservative Supreme Court that would later issue the landmark ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. Since Trump left office, McConnell has occasionally offered thinly veiled criticism of the former president. Trump has gone even further, pushing xenophobic attacks against former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who is married to McConnell and resigned from Trump’s Cabinet in the wake of January 6. Trump also unsuccessfully tried to push McConnell out of his Senate GOP leadership post.
McConnell did not speak to Trump for years after the Capitol riot, a rift that a former top aide previously described to Business Insider.
In March, McConnell endorsed Trump after it became apparent that the former president was on the glide path to a third straight Republican presidential nomination. This summer, McConnell and Trump met face-to-face for the first time in over three years, which signaled how the pair were trying to achieve unity after constant bickering.
Tackett attributes McConnell’s decision to endorse Trump despite everything to “the price he paid for power.” He certainly isn’t the only Republican to change his mind about Trump.
As McConnell pointed out, Vance, the GOP vice presidential nominee, was once a self-described “Never Trumper.” Privately, Vance mused to a friend that Trump was like Hitler. Publicly, Vance wrote that Trump was “cultural heroin.”
A representative for McConnell did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment