The “Old Crow” is scratching back a little.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., took an understated end-of-year victory lap over former President Donald Trump, saying his nemesis has been “diminished” by a seemingly unending string of legal and political setbacks.
“Here’s what I think has changed: I think the former president’s political clout has diminished,” McConnell told NBC News.
Without mentioning Trump by name, the longtime Senate Republican leader suggested the former president’s grip on the GOP may be easing after he contributed to an underwhelming performance in the midterm elections.
McConnell and other mainstream conservatives blame Trump for picking flawed candidates who failed to win in swing state Senate races.
“We can do a better job with less potential interference,” McConnell said.
Trump has spent much of the last two years hammering McConnell as an “old crow” and a Republican in name only who should be ousted from the party leadership.
The courtly McConnell rarely hits back. He even kept his mouth shut when Trump used racial slurs against McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao, who is from Taiwan.
McConnell, who will lead the Republican caucus in the Senate for the next two years at least, did not mention Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
Despite their bitter feud, McConnell has refused to rule out voting for Trump if he wins the GOP nomination.
He focused instead on the winnable Senate races that Republicans lost in Georgia, New Hampshire and Arizona after Trump pushed for his own extremist candidates who failed to win over moderates.
“We lost support that we needed among independents and moderate Republicans,” McConnell said. “(It was) primarily related to the view they had of us as a party — largely made by the former president — that we were sort of nasty and tended toward chaos.”
McConnell did not discuss Trump’s myriad legal problems, which were compounded this week when the congressional Jan. 6 committee referred him for potential criminal prosecution.
He said that the “entire nation knows” that Trump was responsible for Jan. 6. But critics say McConnell let Trump off the hook when he failed to push for his conviction at an impeachment trial that would have barred him from ever holding office again.
