In an interview with Vanity Fair published on Monday, former President Trump slammed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) for defending the filibuster during his presidency, when Republicans held a slight majority in both houses of Congress.
“He’s a stupid person,” Trump said of McConnell. “I don’t think he’s smart enough.”
“I tried to convince Mitch McConnell to get rid of the filibuster, to terminate it, so that we would get everything, and he was a knucklehead and he didn’t do it,” he added.
The former president also compared McConnell unfavorably to Meade Esposito, a local Democratic party boss in Brooklyn from the 1960s through the 1980s.
“Mitch McConnell compared to Meade Esposito, it’s like a baby compared to a grownup football player with brains on top of everything else,” Trump said.
Esposito was convicted on charges related to a municipal corruption scandal in 1987.
Currently, Democrats are tied with Republicans 50-50 in the Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote. A number of Democrats have called to eliminate the filibuster in order to pass legislation with a simple majority vote in the Senate but moderate senators Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) oppose the move.
The former president has repeatedly criticized McConnell, including after the minority leader tore into Trump’s actions leading up to and during the January 6 Capitol riot. McConnell ultimately voted to acquit Trump during the latter’s second impeachment trial.
American citizens “used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of domestic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police,” McConnell said in February. “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.”
Trump has repeatedly fired back at McConnell for his refusal to oppose the certification of the 2020 election results.
“If that were [Chuck] Schumer instead of this dumb son of a b****, Mitch McConnell, they would never allow it to happen,” Trump said in April.