In ‘The Price of Power,’ McConnell says Trump’s MAGA movement is ‘completely wrong’

For years, Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s distaste for former President Donald Trump has been characterized through calculated restraint, but in a new biography on McConnell set to be released next week, McConnell criticizes the former president in no uncertain terms, at varying points calling Trump “stupid,” “ill-tempered,” a “narcissist” and a “despicable human being.”

With less than two weeks until an Election Day that could see Trump return to the White House, McConnell, who has served as his party’s leader in the Senate for a record-breaking 17 years, says Trump’s MAGA movement has “done a lot of damage” to the Republican Party and turned it into something that former President Ronald Reagan “wouldn’t recognize.”

ABC News has obtained an advance copy of the book “The Price of Power” by Associated Press Deputy Washington Bureau Chief Michael Tackett. The book offers a thorough treatment of McConnell’s life starting with his early polio affliction and ending with his looming departure from leadership after the upcoming election. His exit from his position atop his conference is colored by his fracture from Trump and the direction he has taken the party.

“I know I can’t influence the broad Republican Party, but I have influence here, and I’m going to use it because I think this is important to the country, and I think the MAGA movement is completely wrong,” McConnell says in the book.

“The Price of Power” details McConnell’s increasing dissatisfaction with Trump leading up to the 2020 election and in the days that followed.

After the election, McConnell said, “It’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump left office, and that Trump’s efforts to raise unfounded electoral challenges and allege a rigged election “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.”

Still, Trump heads into Nov. 5 with an endorsement from McConnell.

“Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now,” McConnell said in a statement to ABC News.

‘Detached from reality’

McConnell called Trump’s behavior after the 2020 election “detached from reality.”

“His post-election behavior was increasingly detached from reality,” McConnell says in the book “and it seems to me he made up this alternate universe of how things happened.”

The book details McConnell’s day on Jan. 6, 2021, including the speech he gave on the Senate floor urging senators not to oppose the electoral count just before the chamber was evacuated.

McConnell said he believed what Trump did on Jan. 6 was an “impeachable offense.”

“I’m not at all conflicted about whether what the president did is an impeachable offense. I think it is. Urging an insurrection and people attacking the Capitol as a direct result… is about as close to an impeachable offense as you can imagine, with the possible exception of maybe being an agent for another country.”

On Feb. 13, 2021, McConnell gave a floor speech in which he laid blame for the insurrection on Trump.

“They did this because they’d been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry. He lost an election. Former President Trump’s actions preceded the riot in a disgraceful dereliction of duty. . . . There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it,” he said on the floor that day.

Still, McConnell would eventually go on to vote against impeachment. And later, after the Republican party selected Trump as its nominee in 2024, he also endorsed him.

,

A political calculation

It was a political calculation McConnell made that differentiated him from some of Trump’s more vocal opponents like Rep. Liz Cheney, who lost her primary largely because she dared to challenge Trump.

“Where I differed with Liz is I didn’t see how blowing yourself up and taking yourself off the playing field was helpful to getting the party back to where she and I probably both think it ought to be,” McConnell told Tackett, later adding, “I think her sort of self-sacrificial act maybe sells books but it isn’t going to have an impact changing the party. That’s where we differed.”

Even before the 2020 election, McConnell’s relationship with Trump was a rocky one.

As Trump began rising in prominence as a possible nominee in 2016, McConnell described him as “this most unusual nominee.”

“What I tried to do, since I had candidates in different states dealing with the Trump factor differently, was to keep my mouth shut, because I didn’t want to become an issue in a given Senate race,” McConnell told his oral historian shortly after the election, according to the book.

The book details the behind-the-scenes relationship between McConnell and then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, who said they “took turns” talking to Trump. Ryan described Trump in the book as an “amoral narcissist.”

“We were just more surprised every day, every week, every month just how loopy he was, how erratic he was, how strange he was,” Ryan says in the book. “He would shoot the messengers, and Mitch and I were always the messengers. We would always have to explain to him the practical limitations of government. He never liked hearing that.”

McConnell was critical of a number of Trump’s moves, including his decision to meddle in the 2017 Alabama special election that saw Republican Roy Moore beaten by Democrat Doug Jones.

“I recommended Trump stay out of it,” McConnell said. Instead, “Trump got right in the middle of it and tried to get Moore elected, and, amazingly enough, Alabama elected a Democrat to the Senate.” Said McConnell: “I’m glad the Democrat won.”

He said Trump’s decision to fire his then-FBI Director James Comey was another misstep.

“His own actions have put him in jeopardy, and I’m sure his lawyers are probably going nuts, because he won’t shut up about it. He’s completely uncontrollable,” McConnell said.

Despite all of this, in the leadup to the 2020 election, McConnell still appeared at a rally with Trump in Kentucky. He thanked him for “making America great again”.

That speech focused largely on the impact that Trump and McConnell had jointly on influencing the federal courts.