‘Despicable Human Being’: Mitch McConnell Privately Said He Couldn’t Wait For ‘Stupid’ Trump to Leave Office, Per Report

AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley, File

A new book of personal accounts of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) revealed a very scathing opinion of former President Donald Trump , one that was in stark contrast to McConnell’s public comments.

Michael Tackett , deputy Washington bureau chief at the Associated Press, drew from nearly three decades of McConnell’s political career using sources including recorded diaries by the elder statesmen and past interviews. But in the finished book, The Price of Power , which hits shelves on October 29, Tackett uncovered several shockingly negative assessments of the ex-president by McConnell, who has publicly expressed his support and endorsed him in the 2024 election.

After Trump lost the election in 2020, McConnell congratulated his former Senate colleague President Joe Biden and warned his fellow Republicans not to challenge the election results. But behind the scenes — and as Trump tried and failed to overturn the election results — he apparently couldn’t wait to see the last of Trump:

Privately, he said in his oral history that “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump left office, and that Trump’s behavior “only underscores the good judgment of the American people. They’ve had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him.”

“And for a narcissist like him,” McConnell continued, “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.”

Before those Georgia runoffs, McConnell said Trump is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered and can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie.”

An account of the aftermath of January 6, which had McConnell in a secure location while his aides “barricaded” in the office, revealed an emotional moment between the former Senate Majority Leader and his staff:

McConnell then went to his office to address his staff, some of whom had barricaded themselves in the office as rioters banged on their doors. He started to sob softly as he thanked them, Tackett writes.

“You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this,” he told them.

Despite that, and despite saying on the Senate floor that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the insurrection at the Capitol, McConnell voted to acquit Trump after he was impeached by the House.

But McConnell’s private frustration came even before the 2020 election and January 6. During the Covid pandemic, McConnell lambasted Trump for holding up the bipartisan aid package: “This despicable human being is sitting on this package of relief that the American people desperately need.”

McConnell also privately blamed Trump for Republican losses during the 2018 midterm elections, Tackett wrote, costing them the majority in the House:

Trump “has every characteristic you would not want a president to have,” McConnell said in an oral history at the time, and was “not very smart, irascible, nasty.”

McConnell told the AP on Thursday: “Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what [Sen. JD Vance (R-OH)], [Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)], and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now.”