Mitch McConnell has a terrible excuse for bad-mouthing Trump

Talk about throwing your friends under the bus.

Mitch McConnell responded to a forthcoming book in which he exposed old statements about Donald Trump – including that the former president was “stupid” and a “despicable human being” – by saying in a statement that JD Vance could do much worse said.

“Whatever I have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham and others have said about him,” McConnell told the Associated Press. “But we’re all on the same team now.”

The jarring statement revived Vance’s old attacks on his vice president less than three weeks before Election Day.

McConnell was likely referring to Vance’s now-viral Facebook message from 2016 that said Trump was “America’s Hitler.”

“I vacillate between thinking that Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon, who wouldn’t be so bad (and might even prove useful), or that he is America’s Hitler,” Vance wrote to an old friend. “How is that discouraging?”

Other not-so-nice comments Vance made about his vice president included once calling Trump a “cultural heroin” whose presidential campaign promised to “put a needle in America’s collective vein.”

On another occasion in 2016, Vance told NPR that he planned to vote third-party because he “can’t stand Trump.” If no viable third option is still in the race, Vance told the radio station, he may even have to “hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton.”

McConnell, 82, is probably right that his comments — recorded in a series of private “personal oral histories” that he gave to a biographer — are not as bad as what Vance had to say eight years ago. But the comments are still raising eyebrows, especially from a politician who has actively pushed for Trump to return to the White House this year.

“It should be no surprise that he will have my support as a nominee,” McConnell said of Trump in March.

Not long ago, however, McConnell celebrated Americans denying Trump a second term in 2020.

“They just had enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost daily, and they fired him,” McConnell said in one of his diaries, according to the AP.

In another instance, McConnell reportedly said that Trump was “virtually responsible” for the “disgraceful” attack on the US Capitol on January 6 and that he feared Trump’s rhetoric would only get worse after his defeat in 2020 .

“For a narcissist like him [Trump]“That was really hard to take, and that’s why his behavior since the election is far worse than before, because now he has no filter at all,” McConnell said.