Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is urging President Trump privately and publicly to sync his messaging and tweets with the Republican agenda in Congress and prevent unnecessary distractions for the party.
McConnell, in a lengthy interview with the Washington Examiner Wednesday afternoon, said he generally agrees with the president’s agenda, his Cabinet choices and even his executive action imposing a temporary halt on immigrants and travelers from seven countries.
But Trump’s tendency to tweet off-topic remarks, taking judges who rule against him to task, and even blasting Nordstrom from dropping his daughter’s clothing line is another matter entirely.
“I mentioned that I like what the president is doing. I don’t always like what the president is saying,” McConnell said. “I do think he frequently, by wading into other matters, takes attention away [from] the very substantial things we’re already accomplishing.”
McConnell highlighted the congressional repeal of several regulations President Obama issued in his final months in office, including one that imposed new water emissions testing in streams for coal and other factories.
“If you consider repealing regulations important, we’re already doing that,” he said. “So I am not fond of what he says sometimes because I do think it takes us off message and makes everything more difficult.”
The president’s late night and early morning Tweets often cause McConnell needless headaches, he concedes. Asked whether he would like to see Trump rein in his tweeting, McConnell said he’s “not overly opposed to tweets.”
“I do think it depends on what you’re tweeting,” he said. “What I’ve said publicly and what I’ve said to him is I think much of what he tweets makes it more challenging for us to go in the direction we want to go.”
McConnell said he told Trump as much as recently as Friday during a meeting at the White House.
“Obviously, I’ve had a huge impact, right?” he said. “You can tell how persuasive I was.”
Other than offering unsolicited Twitter advice, he said he and president have a really good relationship and speak “fairly often.”
“We’re doing fine,” he said.
McConnell specifically defended Trump’s rollout of the immigration and travel ban executive order, which many Republicans criticized as overly broad and rushed out too soon without proper vetting. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last week ruled to continue blocking enforcement of the ban.
While McConnell has said there should be no religious test for immigration or travel, he has generally supported the executive action and says he doesn’t consider its rollout “a stumble” by the Trump administration.
“I don’t think it’s all that unusual for White Houses to be stopped in court by executive orders,” he said. “It happened to Obama frequently. It happened to Trump. I would not consider that all that extraordinary.”
