Having cleared the field of primary challengers, former President Donald Trump is poised to become the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated that he will support Trump for president.
“It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States,” McConnell said in a statement, according to the Washington Post. “It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.
“During his presidency, we worked together to accomplish great things for the American people including tax reform that supercharged our economy and a generational change of our federal judiciary — most importantly, the Supreme Court. I look forward to the opportunity of switching from playing defense against the terrible policies the Biden administration has pursued to a sustained offense geared towards making a real difference in improving the lives of the American people,” McConnell reportedly said in the statement.
Trump thanked McConnell in a post on Truth Social, writing, “Thank you, Mitch. I look forward to working with you and a Republican Senate MAJORITY to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who served as transportation secretary during most of Trump’s White House tenure, resigned from that post on the heels of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. In a letter to colleagues that she shared on social media, Chao wrote, “Yesterday, our country experienced a traumatic and entirely avoidable event as supporters of the President stormed the Capitol building following a rally he addressed. As I’m sure is the case with many of you, it has deeply troubled me in a way that I simply cannot set aside.”
Following the Jan. 6 riot, McConnell claimed that Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events” that took place on January 6.
In a statement, Trump called McConnell “a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.”
In a September 2022 Truth Social post, Trump referred to Chao as McConnell’s “China loving wife, Coco Chow.” In a January 2023 post, Trump called Chao McConnell’s “China flagrant boss, Coco Chow.”
McConnell recently announced that his current term as Senate GOP leader will be his last in the leadership slot. That means that if Trump wins election later this year, there will be a different Senate GOP leader in place when he begins his second term in the White House.
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