CONGRESS
McConnell calls out 'diminished' Trump, vows not
to bow to his candidates in 2024
Exclusive: The Senate GOP leader says in an interview
that Trump hurt the party in the 2022 elections by making swing voters see
Republicans as “nasty” and attracted to “chaos.”
Dec. 23,
2022, 1:00 PM CET
By Sahil
Kapur
WASHINGTON
— Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell deferred to former President Donald
Trump’s handpicked candidates in competitive midterm races, culminating in
jarring defeats and a larger Democratic majority that bucked the odds.
He promises
not to let that happen again, insisting he will “actively look for quality
candidates” to promote in the 2024 primaries.
In a rare
and pointed criticism of the former president, who's seeking a comeback in two
years, McConnell said Trump’s power is on the wane and called on him to back
off Senate primaries.
“Here’s
what I think has changed: I think the former president’s political clout has
diminished,” McConnell told NBC News on Wednesday in a wide-ranging interview
in his Capitol Hill office.
The
diminished standing has made McConnell — and by extension his allies, like the
deep-pocketed Senate Leadership Fund super PAC — “less inclined to accept cards
that may be dealt to us,” he said.
“We can do
a better job with less potential interference,” he said. “The former president
may have other things to do.”
McConnell
also blamed Trump for tarnishing the party’s image among crucial independent
and swing voters, who rejected GOP Senate contenders in the states that decided
the majority. He said that the party underperformed in “every state” —
including the red state of Ohio, which Republicans narrowly won — and that its
performance was “fatal” in Arizona, New Hampshire and Georgia.
“We lost
support that we needed among independents and moderate Republicans, 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
said. “And oddly enough, even though that subset of voters did not approve of
President Biden, they didn’t have enough confidence in us in several instances
to give us the majority we needed.”
McConnell's
sharp criticism raises the tension between the two GOP leaders ahead of a
potentially chaotic two years for the party, which faces deep divisions over
governing and political strategy as it prepares to claim control of the House
and looks ahead to 2024.
A spokesman
for Trump didn't respond to a request for comment.
McConnell
defended his decision not to intervene in most of the 2022 Senate primaries. He
said he “looked at the landscape” and believed he had only two chances to pick
favorites against flawed candidates: in Missouri, to defeat scandal-plagued
Eric Greitens, and in Alabama, to stop far-right Rep. Mo Brooks.
“In the
other states, Trump’s support was so significant — we could have spent a lot of
money, maybe trying to come up with a different candidate and maybe not succeeding,”
he said. “And so my conclusion was that everywhere else, we had to play with
the cards that were dealt.”
McConnell
is seeking to turn the page on a disastrous Senate cycle for the GOP and seize
on various pickup opportunities to win the majority in 2024. Democrats are
defending three seats in red states and five more in closely divided states.
Their best hopes to flip seats are in Republican-leaning Florida and Texas. And
yet, it's Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. — not McConnell — who's
radiating confidence about winning the majority in 2024.
McConnell
has been locked in a bitter feud with a vengeful Trump after having criticized
his actions on Jan. 6, 2021 — and the relationship presents land mines for the
GOP in 2024, particularly if Trump is its nominee. McConnell recognizes those
land mines — he won't endorse in the presidential primary. He has suggested
Trump cannot win the nomination again, but he kept the door open to backing him
in the general election if he does.
He also
spent large parts of 2022 feuding over strategy with Sen. Rick Scott of
Florida, the GOP Senate campaign chief. Scott rejects McConnell’s view that
Trump was the problem — he argues Republicans lost because they failed to offer
an agenda that inspires voters. Scott even mounted a rare challenge to
McConnell for the caucus' top job and lost.
Still,
McConnell had his own role in the GOP's underperformance this year. Using
aggressive parliamentary tactics, he arguably played a larger role than anybody
else in building the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which
sparked a revolt among supporters of abortion rights when it overturned Roe v.
Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June.
Asked
repeatedly about the role of the Dobbs decision in the GOP's failures,
McConnell expressed no regrets.
He conceded
that the ruling “generated enthusiasm among Democrats, not surprisingly,” in
the midterm election. But he said GOP turnout was “fine” and argued that
abortion wasn’t the reason key independents and swing voters backed Democrats.
“They may
have been ginned up some with their base,” McConnell said. But he
insisted: “Our biggest problem was candidate quality.”
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