McConnell called Trump 'stupid' and 'despicable' in private after the 2020 election, a new book says

Mitch McConnell said after the 2020 election that then-U.S. president Donald Trump was 'stupid as well as being ill-tempered,' a 'despicable human being' and a 'narcissist,' according to excerpts from a new biography of the Senate Republican leader that will be released this month.

Mitch McConnell said after the 2020 election that then-U.S. president Donald Trump was "stupid as well as being ill-tempered," a "despicable human being" and a "narcissist," according to excerpts from a new biography of the Senate Republican leader that will be released this month.

McConnell made the remarks in private as part of a series of personal oral histories that he made available to Michael Tackett, deputy Washington bureau chief of The Associated Press. Tackett's book, "The Price of Power," draws from almost three decades of McConnell's recorded diaries and from years of interviews with the normally reticent Kentucky Republican.

The animosity between Trump and McConnell is well known -- Trump once called McConnell " a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack." But McConnell's private comments are by far his most brutal assessment of the former president and could be seized on by Democrats before the Nov. 5 election. The biography will be released Oct. 29, one week before Election Day that will decide if Trump returns to the White House.

Despite those strong words, McConnell has endorsed Trump's 2024 run, saying earlier this year "it should come as no surprise" that he would support the Republican party's nominee. He shook Trump's hand in June when Trump visited GOP senators on Capitol Hill.

McConnell, 82, announced this year that he will step aside as Republican leader after the election but stay in the Senate through the end of his term in 2026.

The comments about Trump quoted in the book came in the weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Trump was then actively trying to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden. McConnell feared this would hurt Republicans in two Georgia runoffs and cost them the Senate majority. Democrats won both races.

Publicly, McConnell had congratulated Biden after the Electoral College certified the presidential vote and the senator warned his fellow Republicans not to challenge the results. But he did not say much else. Privately, he said in his oral history that "it's not just the Democrats who are counting the days" until Trump left office, and that Trump's behaviour "only underscores the good judgment of the American people. They've had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him."