Even before he was elected, the top Republicans in the House and Senate vowed allegiance to Donald Trump. But on January 6, 2021, a President refusing to admit defeat incited a violent and deadly insurrection on the U.S. Capitol – and democracy itself – and Leaders Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell came close to totally turning against the soon-to-be ex-President.
“In the days after the attack, Representative Kevin McCarthy planned to tell Mr. Trump to resign. Senator Mitch McConnell told allies impeachment was warranted. But their fury faded fast,” The New York Times reveals Thursday with never-before reported comments from both GOP leaders.
“I’ve had it with this guy,” McCarthy told a group of Republican leaders. In the days following the insurrection he called Trump’s conduct on January 6 “atrocious and totally wrong,” said Trump was “inciting people” to attack, and declared the President’s remarks during the “Stop the Steal” rally before the attack “not right by any shape or any form.”
He told his leadership team what Trump “did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should defend it.”
And he told them he believed the Democrats would successfully impeach Trump a second time, and vowed to tell the President, “I think this will pass, and it would be my recommendation you should resign.”
McCarthy went as far as bringing up the 25th Amendment, The Times reports.
But within days both McCarthy and McConnell went back to business as usual: total subservience to Trump.
“I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference,” McConnell told a friend, according to The Times.
At a Capitol Hill office lunch over Chick-fil-A, McConnell told two advisors, “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us,” referring to Trump and his upcoming impeachment.
“If this isn’t impeachable, I don’t know what is,” McConnell had also said.
Now, McConnell almost never talks about Trump.
Almost.
“In a Fox News interview in late February 2021,” The Times adds, “Mr. McConnell was asked whether he would support Mr. Trump in 2024 if the former president again became the G.O.P. nominee for the presidency. Mr. McConnell answered: ‘Absolutely.'”
Critics are blasting McConnell and McCarthy.
“I know all about bullying. I was bullied all through school,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator Leonard Pitts, Jr. “But I simply cannot understand two adult men so scared of one blustering blowhard that they would put their country at risk rather than stand up to him. What spineless, craven little men.”
Others are calling the two top GOP leaders “spineless,” and cowards as well.
Adam Smith, Action Fund Director at two political action committees, calls the Times’ report the “least surprising news you’ll read all day: Republican leaders are spineless.”
“Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell are, and always have been, spineless,” adds The Lincoln Project.
McConnell and McCarthy “lost their spines,” opined New York Times congressional correspondent Jonathan Weisman.
“They know what’s right. They’re cowards,” says former journalist Ron Fournier.
Political satirist and Emmy nominated filmmaker Jeremy Newberger served up this title: “Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell: A Picture of Whatever the Opposite of Courage Is.”
“Profiles in cowardice,” writes Tennessee State University assistant political science professor David Ryan Miller. “McConnell and McCarthy knew better. They could have helped convict and disqualify Donald Trump, effectively blacklisting him from American politics and providing an opportunity to turn the page. They chose not to.”
HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte, who once famously asked Trump, during a televised briefing, if he regretted “all the lying you’ve done to the American people,” also weighed in.