Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-K.Y., met with former President Donald Trump on Thursday and former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., was not happy about it, saying “history will remember the shame.”
Cheney, who left Congress in 2022 after losing reelection to her seat, is one of a select few Republicans who have been critical of Trump and held him responsible for the Jan 6. attack on the U.S. Capitol. She felt that McConnell’s sudden show of support for Trump enabled the former president.
Cheney took to X to lodge her complaints about the Senate GOP leader. “Mitch McConnell knows Trump provoked the violent attack on our Capitol and then ‘watched television happily’ as his mob brutally beat police officers and hunted the Vice President," she noted.
She went on to highlight McConnell’s knowledge of how Trump responded to the “mob” of his supporters who refused to end their assault even as police officers were bleeding on the ground. “He kept repeating his election lies and praising the criminals,’” she said.
Back in February 2021, McConnell himself declared Trump "practically and morally responsible" for the Jan. 6 insurrection. After speaking with Trump Thursday, following his 34 felony convictions, McConnell described the meeting, their first since 2020, as "positive."
“He and I got a chance to talk, we shook hands a few times. He got a lot of standing ovations,” McConnell said, HuffPost reported. “It was an entirely positive meeting. I can’t think of anything to tell you out of it that was negative.”
Cheney, for her part, had plenty of critical things to say about McConnel.
“He knows Trump committed a ‘disgraceful dereliction of duty’ and is a danger to our Republic," she said. "Trump and his collaborators will be defeated, and history will remember the shame of people like McConnell who enabled them.”
