Lee says Senate GOP leadership candidates must call out McConnell for Trump criticism

Utah Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) is calling on Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the two frontrunners to succeed Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), to push back on McConnell’s sharp criticisms of Donald Trump.

Lee accused McConnell of “sabotage” after media outlets reported the GOP leader’s sharp criticisms of Trump in a soon-to-be-released biography.

“Those running for Senate GOP leadership posts need to weigh in on this & commit never to sabotage Republican candidates & colleagues — particularly those who are less than two weeks away from a close election,” Lee posted on the social media site X.

“We must have clarity from the candidates running to replace McConnell on where thye stand on these attacks. They must be clear on how they plan to lead the conference, and on the role of its members,” Lee posted.

“The Senate Republican leader is supposed to help Republicans, not undermine them. Sadly, we’ve had too much of the latter. That must end now,” he wrote.

Lee called on his colleagues to push back on McConnell, who told an oral historian after the 2020 election that he viewed Trump as “stupid as well as being ill-tempered.”

“He also called him “a despicable human being” and a narcissist, according to the biography, “The Price of Power,” by Michael Tackett, the deputy Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press.

McConnel argued at the time that Trump’s “MAGA movement is completely wrong.”

“I think Trump was the biggest factor in changing the Republican Party from what Ronald Reagan viewed and he wouldn’t recognize today,” McConnell said, according to excerpts of the biography reported by CNN Thursday.

“Trump is appealing to people who haven’t been as successful as other people and providing an excuse for that, that these more successful people have somehow … cheated and you don’t deserve to think of yourself as less successful because things haven’t been fair,” McConnell said.

McConnell, who will retire from Senate leadership post at the end of the year, defended his statements this month by noting that Trump’s closest allies, including his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance (R) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), have criticized Trump sharply in the past.

“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,” he said in a statement earlier this month.

Vance, who mocked Trump as an “idiot” and “reprehensible” before the 2016 presidential election, now says he was wrong about Trump and praised him as “very brilliant” at a town hall in Detroit hosted by NewsNation Thursday.