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Last Thursday, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell predicted that while Republicans may take the House during November’s midterm elections, they’re unlikely to flip the Senate due to “candidate quality.” This forecast, which McConnell is not alone in making, did not go over well with former president Donald Trump. How do we know this? Because he took to Truth Social to tell us as much—and by tell us as much, we mean he not only called the lawmaker from Kentucky a “broken down hack” but also insulted the guy’s wife (who happened to be in Trump’s Cabinet).
Yes, on Saturday the ex-president logged on to his sad social media network and angrily typed: “Why do Republicans [sic] Senators allow a broken down hack politician, Mitch McConnell, to openly disparage hard working Republican candidates for the United States Senate. This is such an affront to honor and to leadership. He should spend more time (and money!) helping them get elected, and less time helping his crazy wife and family get rich on China!”
Trump is undoubtedly testy about McConnell’s comments because three of the candidates he’s endorsed for Senate are behind in the polls, and their losses would help Democrats retain control of the chamber. One of those candidates is Dr. Mehmet Oz, who embarrasses himself on a near-daily basis, whether it’s over crudités and salsa or the number of homes he owns. Another is Herschel Walker, whose own campaign staffers have said he’s a “pathological liar” who lies “like he’s breathing.” The third is Blake Masters, who, according to a Fox News poll, would lose to Senator Mark Kelly by eight points if people were voting today. Trump is presumably extra cranky about the Senate prediction given that it came from McConnell, with whom he mostly shared an axis-of-evil kind of alliance while in the White House; he has since made it clear that he wouldn’t mind seeing the man pushed off a cliff. (Last year Trump called McConnell “dour, sullen, and unsmiling,” saying that he lacked “political insight, wisdom, skill, and personality.” He added that McConnell “doesn’t have what it takes, never did, and never will.” He also reportedly had to be convinced not to accuse the Kentucky lawmaker of “having too many chins but not enough smarts.”)
As for McConnell’s wife, her name is Elaine Chao, and she served as transportation secretary in the Trump administration until resigning in the wake of the attack on the Capitol, which she deemed a “traumatic and entirely avoidable event” that she could not simply “set aside.” While Trump has a long history of attacking people who’ve worked for him, having famously described his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, as “dumb as a rock” and White House communications aide Omarosa Manigault Newman as “a crazed, crying lowlife,” this appears to be the first time he’s publicly lashed out at Chao. Presumably, that’s simply a matter of her being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time— i.e., married to Mitch McConnell—but it’s also not out of the realm of possibility that it had a little something to do with the news that she recently sat down for an interview with the January 6 committee. According to CNN, Chao, among others, was part of discussions re: “invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from power.” So you can probably imagine this development got the ex-president man-child particularly out of sorts.
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