Mitch McConnell: MAGA Republican Party would be 'unrecognizable' to Ronald Reagan
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) bemoaned that his party would be unrecognizable to "The Gipper" and accused its MAGA leader of appealing to its base by giving "less successful" people an out — by claiming they're "cheated."
McConnell talked with The Associated Press about the upcoming biography "The Price of Power," by Michael Tackett, deputy Washington bureau chief of The Associated Press, and slammed what the GOP has become.
“I think Trump was the biggest factor in changing the Republican Party from what Ronald Reagan viewed and he wouldn’t recognize today,” McConnell told AP, according to CNN.
He added that Trump has “done a lot of damage to our party’s image and our ability to compete.”
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“Trump is appealing to people who haven’t been as successful as other people and providing an excuse for that, that these more successful people have somehow been cheated, and you don’t deserve to think of yourself as less successful because things haven’t been fair,” he said.
Additionally, McConnell said Trump was "erratic" after his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden — a fact he has repeatedly denied. Unfortunately, the Kentucky Republican said, about half of the country's Republicans "believe whatever he says."
He believed that many Republicans would join Democrats in celebrating Jan. 20, 2021 — when Trump left office — and reportedly leaned toward voting to convict Trump at the second impeachment trial before he voted to acquit.
“I don’t know whether you can make a conclusive argument that he’s directly responsible for them storming the Capitol, but I think it’s not in dispute that those folks would not have been here in the first place if he had not asked them to come and to disrupt the actual acceptance of the outcome of the election,” McConnell said.