McConnell says ‘MAGA movement is completely wrong’ and Reagan ‘wouldn’t recognize’ Trump’s GOP

Morgan Rimmer, CNN

(CNN) — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered a scathing assessment of the modern Republican Party in an upcoming biography, saying the “MAGA movement is completely wrong” and that Ronald Reagan “wouldn’t recognize” the party today.

“I think Trump was the biggest factor in changing the Republican Party from what Ronald Reagan viewed and he wouldn’t recognize today,” McConnell told the Associated Press’ Michael Tackett for the upcoming biography “The Price of Power” obtained by CNN ahead of its release.

McConnell added that the former president 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 been cheated, and you don’t deserve to think of yourself as less successful because things haven’t been fair,” he said.

Some of McConnell’s strongest comments were focused on Trump’s behavior after he lost the election in 2020, calling him “erratic.”

“Unfortunately, about half the Republicans in the country believe whatever he says,” McConnell said at the time, adding to an oral historian, “I think I’m pretty safe in saying it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days until he leaves on January 20, but the Republicans as well.” McConnell gave Tackett access to his personal archive, including an oral history he has been recording since 1995, for the book.

The Republican leader eventually voted to acquit Trump during the second impeachment trial, focused on the former president’s involvement in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. However, Tackett reports that McConnell had leaned towards voting to convict at certain points.

“I’m not at all conflicted about whether what the president did is an impeachable offense. I think it is. Urging an insurrection and people attacking the Capitol as a direct result … is about as close to an impeachable offense as you can imagine, with the possible exception of maybe being an agent for another country,” said McConnell.

“I don’t know whether you can make a conclusive argument that he’s directly responsible for them storming the Capitol, but I think it’s not in dispute that those folks would not have been here in the first place if he had not asked them to come and to disrupt the actual acceptance of the outcome of the election,” the Senate GOP leader said.

The Kentucky Republican did not mince words, calling Trump a “sleazeball,” a “narcissist” and saying that the former president is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered.” He added that Trump is “not very smart, irascible, nasty, just about every quality you would not want somebody to have.”

While he dismissed Trump’s attacks against him, saying “every time he takes a shot at me, I think it’s good for my reputation,” he added that the former president’s attacks on his wife, Elaine Chao, Trump’s former Transportation Secretary, went too far.

In 2022, Trump referred to Chao as McConnell’s “China loving wife, Coco Chow” in a post on Truth Social. Tackett reports that Chao was “deeply disturbed” by the comments, and McConnell said that his wife is “not used to taking a punch.”

Tackett also reports that McConnell cried while addressing his staff in the hours after the attack on the Capitol. “You are my staff, and you are my responsibility,” he told them. “You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this.”

He called the rioters who entered the Senate chamber, “narcissistic, just like Donald Trump, sitting in the vice president’s chair taking pictures of themselves,” adding it was a “shocking occurrence and further evidence of Donald Trump’s complete unfitness for office.”

In a statement to CNN about his comments on the former president in the book, McConnell said, “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.”

The Senate GOP leader and the former president have long had a rocky relationship, which Tackett details in the book. However, McConnell has endorsed Trump, and met with him back in June of this year during Trump’s meeting with Senate Republicans off the Hill.

McConnell did not restrict his comments in the biography to the former president. He also criticized Sen. Rick Scott, who led the Senate Republicans’ campaign committee during the 2022 midterms and proposed a highly controversial policy plan that was criticized by both parties, before unsuccessfully challenging McConnell for Senate GOP leader. Scott has announced he is running for leader again this year, though this time he will not be challenging McConnell, who will be stepping down from his leadership post.

“I don’t think Rick makes a very good victim,” quipped McConnell. “I think he did a poor job of running the (Senate campaign) committee. His plan was used by the Democrats against our candidates as late as the last weekend (before the election). He promoted the fiction that we were in the middle of a big sweep when there was no tangible evidence of it. And I think his campaign against me was some kind of ill-fated effort to turn the attention away from him and on to somebody else.”

McConnell will remain in his role as Senate GOP leader through the end of the year until the start of the new Congress in early January.

The Kentucky Republican, who has previously said he is most proud of his legacy in shaping the Supreme Court and leading the efforts to confirm three new conservative justices during Trump’s presidency, acknowledged that Justice Clarence Thomas “exercised pretty questionable judgment,” when he chose to accept trips from a major GOP donor. “But then again, I’m not sure what the rules are,” he added.

In April 2023, when asked about reports on the trips, McConnell accused Democratic senators of launching political attacks on Thomas. “The Supreme Court and the court system is a whole separate part of our Constitution,” he said. “And the Democrats, it seems to me, spend a lot of time criticizing individual members of the court and going after the court as an institution.”

McConnell has previously praised Thomas’ judgment and his work on the Court. “I have total confidence in Justice Thomas’s impartiality in every aspect of the work of the Court,” he said on the Senate floor in 2022, before the reports of Thomas’s travel came to light.

McConnell also expressed support for special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s actions around the 2020 election and the insurrection. “I think it was the single most – in a category by itself – of how wrong all of it was and there’s no doubt who inspired it, and I just hope that he’ll have to pay a price for it,” said McConnell. “If he hasn’t committed indictable offenses, I don’t know what one is.”

CNN’s Manu Raju and Ted Barrett contributed to this report.

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