Former US President Trump released a scathing statement on Tuesday afternoon targeting Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell.
Fox News reports that Trump, once an ally of the Kentucky Republican, rebuked McConnell using terms harsher than those of most Democrats.
Naming McConnell a “dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack,” Trump said that the GOP would “never again be respected or strong” with McConnell at its helm.
McConnell has said Trump bears responsibility for the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot and suggested he voted not to convict Trump on an impeachment count of inciting the riot only because he is no longer president.
Trump, in his statement, said that Democrats and Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. plays “McConnell like a fiddle” and blamed McConnell for the GOP’s Senate losses in Georgia for not offering big enough stimulus checks.
“In ‘Mitch’s Senate,’ over the last two election cycles, I single-handedly saved at least 12 Senate seats, more than eight in the 2020 cycle alone—and then came the Georgia disaster, where we should have won both U.S. Senate seats, but McConnell matched the Democrat offer of $2,000 stimulus checks with $600.”
Trump also insisted that Republicans lost in Georgia because they hadn’t maintained election integrity. “Many Republicans in Georgia voted Democrat, or just didn’t vote, because of their anguish at their inept Governor, Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and the Republican Party, for not doing its job on Election Integrity during the 2020 Presidential race.”
The former president repeated a claim sometimes proffered by McConnell’s opponents that the senator is soft on China because he has business ties in the country through his Taiwanese wife, Elaine Chao, Trump’s former Transportation Secretary. “McConnell has no credibility on China because of his family’s substantial Chinese business holdings. He does nothing on this tremendous economic and military threat,” Trump wrote.
Trump and McConnell found themselves at odds in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when McConnell urged his colleagues to vote to certify the election for President Biden as Trump continued to assert that the election had been stolen from him.
Trump promised to back primary rivals against McConnell “where necessary and appropriate.”
McConnell eviscerated the former president on the Senate floor Saturday, after voting to acquit him in the impeachment trial. He argued the Senate didn’t have the Constitutional authority to convict a private citizen, but left the door open for a criminal trial.
McConnell said the attack “was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.”