McConnell steps up attacks on a weakened Trump

Source: The Hill | December 14, 2022 | Alexander Bolton

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is stepping up his attacks on former President Trump as Trump’s support dips.

The Senate GOP leader on Tuesday blamed Trump for the “candidate quality” problem that hampered the party’s bid to recapture the Senate in 2022, marking the third time in three weeks that McConnell has directly criticized the former president after repeatedly avoiding engaging with him over the past two years.

The stronger pushback comes as polls show Trump’s support is slipping among Republican voters, a trend that has accelerated since Trump-aligned candidates lost important races across the country in the midterm elections.

A USA Today-Suffolk University poll published Tuesday showed that 61 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters want someone else to be the party’s nominee for president in 2024.

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McConnell told reporters Tuesday that Trump was a big reason why Senate GOP leaders were not able to steer Senate nominations to stronger candidates in key battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia and New Hampshire.

He had hinted at a press conference a week after Election Day that he thought Trump was a drag on Republican efforts to win back the Senate, but he made his criticism more explicit after Republicans lost another key race, last week’s Senate runoff in Georgia.

“We ended up having a candidate quality [issue],” he told reporters Tuesday. “Look at Arizona, look at New Hampshire and the challenging situation in Georgia as well.”

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“Our ability to control the primary outcome was quite limited in ’22 because the support of the former president proved to be very decisive in these primaries. So my view was do the best you can with the cards you’re dealt. Hopefully in the next cycle we’ll have quality candidates everywhere and a better outcome,” he said. 

McConnell also took shots at Trump the previous two weeks when he criticized Trump’s call to terminate parts of the Constitution to allow himself to return to the White House and condemned Trump’s dinner at Mar-a-Lago with an outspoken white supremacist and antisemite.

The leader’s stiffening rhetoric against the former president reflects the growing consensus within the Senate GOP conference that Trump would not match up well against President Biden or another Democrat in the 2024 general election and, if nominated for the White House, could drag down candidates in Senate races as well.

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