Excerpts released to news outlets from “The Price of Power,” an upcoming biography of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., reveal that he privately said that former President Donald Trump was "stupid as well as being ill-tempered," a "despicable human being" and a "narcissist" after the 2020 election.
McConnell made those comments to the book's author, Associated Press deputy Washington bureau chief Michael Tackett, at the height of his public spat with Trump in the late 2020 months that culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The feeling between Trump and McConnell is mutual — the former president once called the Kentucky Republican "a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack." They reportedly did not speak for four years after early 2020, when McConnell and other senators found themselves besieged by a mob of Trump supporters convinced that the election was stolen.
But for all the personal acrimony between them, they've also advanced each other's political ambitions. As Senate majority leader from 2015 to 2021, McConnell helped Trump gain credibility in more established and moneyed Republican circles, and his blockade of former President Barack Obama's Supreme Court pick in 2016 may have strengthened the argument for skeptical conservatives to vote for Trump so that he could fill the seat. Trump, despite his fickle ties to GOP orthodoxy, pleased McConnell by sending hundreds of conservative judges, including three Supreme Court nominees, to the Senate for approval and supporting a massive tax cut for America's wealthiest earners.
After the passage of the 2017 tax cut, McConnell said: “All of a sudden, I’m Trump’s new best friend.” During their partnership, Trump reportedly admired McConnell's reputation as a wily and ruthless political operator, complimenting him for being "as mean as a snake" during a White House meeting.
In the end, despite an uncharacteristically fiery condemnation of Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection, McConnell voted to acquit the outgoing president. And though McConnell reportedly hoped that Trump would fade away for other GOP hopefuls to step forward, the former president spent his years in exile successfully wresting control of the party away from McConnell and his allies. When it became clear that Trump would once again be the Republican nominee, a weakened and declining McConnell endorsed him for president.
"The Price of Power" is the third prominent biography of McConnell to be published, and will hit the shelves on Oct. 29. The first, titled "The Cynic," came out in 2014, on the eve of his ascension to Senate majority leader. McConnell then wrote an autobiography in 2016 called "The Long Game." This unofficial trilogy of the McConnell canon effectively captures the arc of his career — that of a man who appeared to value power (and the money that buys it) above all else, who shrewdly used his first 30 years in the Senate to pave his way to the top and who is now leaving behind a Congress and a party that he can no longer control.
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