The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer turned in a major profile on Trump’s biggest enabler in the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell and spills the tea on their real relationship.
Writes Mayer: “Although the two men almost always support each other in public, several members of McConnell’s innermost circle told me that in private things are quite different. They say that behind Trump’s back McConnell has called the President ‘nuts,’ and made clear that he considers himself smarter than Trump, and that he ‘can’t stand him.’ (A spokesman for McConnell, who declined to be interviewed, denies this.) According to one such acquaintance, McConnell said that Trump resembles a politician he loathes: Roy Moore, the demagogic former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, whose 2017 campaign for an open U.S. Senate seat was upended by allegations that he’d preyed on teen-age girls. (Moore denies them.) ‘They’re so much alike,’ McConnell told the acquaintance.”
But McConnell must express fealty: “In McConnell’s reëlection race against McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot, he has been trying to make Trump his virtual running mate. And now that McConnell has helped eliminate nearly all meaningful spending restraints, he can count on practically unlimited funds from billionaire donors. His campaign has already raised $25.6 million, although McGrath has raised even more. Matt Jones, a popular sports-radio host and the co-author of ‘Mitch, Please!,’ a scathing book about McConnell, said, ‘The quickest way for him to be beaten is to turn on Trump.’ Jones told me that he and his co-author had interviewed people in every one of Kentucky’s hundred and twenty counties, and had found only one, an elderly farmer, who was a big McConnell fan. ‘McConnell’s hated here,’ he told me. ‘And Trump is loved. He has no choice but to kiss Trump’s ring.'”
