Senator Mitch McConnell said the MAGA movement “is completely wrong” and Donald Trump has “done a lot of damage” to the Republican party, a new book has revealed.
McConnell, who has long been critical of the former president, delivered a withering assessment of how Trump has transformed the GOP to the point where Ronald Reagan “wouldn’t recognize” the party today.
The revelations have emerged in McConnell’s upcoming biography by Michael Tackett, titled The Price of Power. The Republican Kentucky senator gave Tackett personal recordings of his oral histories spanning almost three decades.
“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 Tackett, according to an extract of the book obtained by CNN.
He added that Trump has “done a lot of damage to our party’s image and our ability to compete.”
McConnell said: “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.”
According to the biography, McConnell also backed the federal criminal charges against Trump in connection to the January 6 Capitol riot and said he hoped the Republican would “pay a price” for the attack.
In the weeks leading up to January 6, McConnell told people in private that Trump was a “despicable human being” and a “narcissist” who is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” according to the book, which will be published on October 29, a week before the election.
McConnell privately told people Trump’s behavior “only underscores the good judgment of the American people” who “had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis.”
“They fired him,” McConnell said, invoking a familiar phrase used by Trump on his reality TV show The Apprentice.
“And for a narcissist like him, 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,” McConnell said.
Despite years of acrimony between Trump and McConnell, and his scathing review of Trump in the book, the GOP senator publicly endorsed him as the Republican presidential candidate in March.
In a statement to CNN about 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.”
