People shouldn’t expect to see Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) continue to publicly spar with ex-President Donald Trump, according to the Washington Post.
McConnell is reportedly going to let Trump have the final word in their brief spat, which saw the former president issue a lengthy screed on Tuesday calling him a “dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack” and claiming Republican senators “will not win again” if they remain allied with McConnell.
The GOP leader’s associates told the Post that he doesn’t plan to speak to Trump ever again after their last conversation on December 14, nor does he have interest in continuing their feud.
Josh Holmes, McConnell’s former chief of staff, told the Post that he would be “very surprised” if McConnell “ever says the words Donald Trump again.”
Trump had attacked McConnell on Tuesday in retaliation to the GOP leader’s public condemnation of the ex-president’s incitement of the violent siege of the Capitol in January.
On Saturday, McConnell said on the Senate floor that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the insurrection, though that speech came right after he had voted to acquit the former president in the impeachment trial.
Then McConnell penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Monday that attempted to tamp down on the outrage over his decision to acquit Trump, asserting again that there was “no question former President Trump bears moral responsibility” for the attack. The GOP leader also suggested that though the ex-president had been acquitted in the trial, there was still room for law enforcement to criminally prosecute him.
It was that op-ed that especially drew Trump’s fury, according to the Post, and the next day the former president fired off a diatribe against McConnell through his political action committee that threatened to back GOP primary challengers against McConnell’s allies and declared that the Kentucky Republican “will never do what needs to be done, or what is right for our Country.”
