It’s doubtful former President Donald Trump even considered responding more in sorrow than in anger to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s criticism of him. Trump stuck to his brutal style of rebuttal, attacking McConnell as an “unsmiling political hack” who “doesn’t have what it takes, never did, and never will.”
This was a mistake by Trump, one he appears to be incapable of recognizing. His style — his raw personality, mean streak, breathtaking conceit — is the main reason he lost reelection. But he seems unaware of this simple fact, though it’s hardly a secret.
Trump must love to exaggerate. He does it so often. In his reply, he claimed that McConnell wouldn’t have been reelected last year without his endorsement. Trump cites a lone poll with McConnell trailing, 41% to 40%.
“That’s the only poll conducted in the entirety of the race that showed it even close,” CNN’s Chris Cillizza wrote. “The idea that Trump somehow ‘saved’ McConnell in the 2020 contest is, in a word, laughable.”
Kevin McLaughlin, who ran the GOP Senate operation, added that he showed Trump a poll with McConnell 20 points ahead. So Trump knows he didn’t save McConnell.
Consider the voters who abandoned Trump in the 2020 cycle. It wasn’t “Beltway Republicans” like McConnell & Co. It was the soft suburban Republicans, conservative-leaning independents, and women who took a hike. After four years, they had come to loath Trump.
What’s striking about this setback is that it occurred despite the success of Trump’s presidency. Indeed, there’s a credible case for regarding his record as the most impressive of any president since Ronald Reagan. Yet he lost ground, even during a fine political climate.
In his screed belittling McConnell, Trump noted that “in 2020, I received the most votes of any sitting president in history,” suggesting that he was a superb candidate. But Trump neglects the accepted count that he lost to President Biden by 7 million votes.
Why did McConnell declare war on Trump in a Senate speech shortly after his acquittal on a charge of inciting the “insurrection” in the Capitol? McConnell had voted for acquittal, but nonetheless, he insisted in his speech that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the rioting mob, saying, “They did this because they’d been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on earth because he was angry he lost an election.”
While the Trump problem is bigger than the uprising in the Capitol, McConnell sees his statements that day as alarming. McConnell described “a growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole, which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet earth.”
McConnell’s fear is a Trump takeover of the Republican Party. And that’s bound to be on Trump’s mind. He has said GOP senators who stay with McConnell “will not win again. … I will back primary rivals who espouse Making America Great Again and our policy of America First.”
Could Trump pull off a coup from the sidelines? Not at the moment. There’s something he’s yet to explain. In his four years, Republicans lost control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency.
If Trump has an answer for this, I don’t recall it. He never accepts blame. Trump is a one-man show. He’s for himself.
McConnell is a party man. He’s a Republican and serious about it. Trump has been a Democrat, a Republican, and a Reformer. With Trump, loyalty is not his long suit. With McConnell, it is. He thinks strategically and is focused on his party.
Steven Hayward, who writes for Power Line and is the author of a terrific two-volume biography of Reagan, has a “theory about why Mitch McConnell decided to go off on Trump as he did after the impeachment vote. My suspicion is that quite a lot of Republican senators (maybe a majority) are fed up with Trump and hope he doesn’t even think about running again in 2024, but saying so publicly will hurt them with Trump’s enthusiastic base,” Hayward wrote.
McConnell is 79 and nearing the end of his career. “I think McConnell deliberately decided to make himself the lightning rod … attracting Trump’s fire rather than having it diffused to other Republican senators,” Hayward said.
Makes sense to me. McConnell is that kind of guy. Trump isn’t.
Fred Barnes is a Washington Examiner senior columnist.
