Former President Donald Trump is escalating a political war with Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-K.Y. — and Trump is winning.
Big time.
The Horn News reported on Saturday that Trump’s popularity remains very high among Republicans despite his feud with establishment members of the party. A recent Hill/HarrisX poll reported that 64 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters are willing to follow Trump if he decided to form a third party.
McConnell has seen the opposite happen.
According to two devastating new polls, McConnell’s popularity and net approval ratings have fallen to an all-time low.
According to a Politico/Morning Consult poll, only 18 percent of voters approve of McConnell while 63 percent disapprove of him. An Economist/YouGov poll is even worse — they say 70 percent disapprove of him.
Trump has been on the attack in recent days. He slammed McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican, as a “dour, sullen and unsmiling political hack,” and repeated his claim on Wednesday that he was the rightful winner of the November election in a series of interviews with conservative outlets after nearly a month of self-imposed silence.
Trump accused the Senate GOP leader of failing to stand up for Republicans after McConnell blasted Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot despite voting to acquit the former president at his second impeachment trial.
“The Republicans are soft. They only hit their own, like Mitch,” Trump told Newsmax. “If they spent the same time hitting [Senate Democratic leader Chuck] Schumer and [President Joe] Biden, the Republicans would be much better off, that I can tell you.
McConnell’s allies hit back. They said Trump’s feud with McConnel is, at best, a distraction and, at worst, a direct threat to the party’s path to the House and Senate majorities in next year’s midterms.
“I don’t think [Trump] cares about winning,” Steven Law, a McConnell ally who leads the most powerful Republican-aligned super PAC in Washington. “He just wants it to be about himself.”
If Trump tries to make himself “the center of attention,” Law said, “that actually could cost Republicans seats in the general election” next year.
Such infighting is not altogether unusual after a political party loses the White House, but in this case, the feuding factions have been willing to attack each other publicly. And there was a broad consensus on Wednesday that the clash would likely extend well into next year’s congressional primary season.
The stakes are higher this time, however, as key players — Trump, among them — have openly threatened the prospect of creating a new political party, which would endanger the Republican Party’s very existence.
Roughly 120 anti-Trump establishment Republicans, including current and former officeholders, secretly convened earlier in the month to contemplate the future of the GOP. 40 percent reportedly supported the idea of creating a new party, according to an internal survey provided by one of the meeting’s organizers, former independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin.
“There’s a lot of energy out there for something new,” McMullin said. He dared Trump and his supporters to follow through with his threats of creating a Patriot Party.
“Frankly, I would welcome him to start a new party and take his most loyal supporters with him. I think that would be a wonderful thing for the party and the country,” McMullin said.
Trump’s exact plans for his political future are still coming together in West Palm Beach, Florida.
He has been banned by Big Tech from social media outlets Facebook and Twitter, but on Wednesday, he broke his monthlong silence, giving his first interviews since leaving the White House after the death of conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh.
On Newsmax, Trump said his team was still exploring its options for returning to social media and “negotiating with a number of people,” while still keeping the option of building his own platform on the table.
“We’re looking at a lot of different things, but I really wanted to be somewhat quiet,” Trump said. He didn’t give a direct answer on whether he intends to run again in 2024.
“Too early to say,” he said, while acknowledging that he missed being president.
Still, Trump said that he has had no problem communicating when he wants to by issuing statements — and has made clear this week that he isn’t leaving politics.
The former president hurled a series of his signature-style attacks at McConnell in a fiery written statement Tuesday. Mainstream Republicans were perhaps most concerned about his threat to support primary challengers against Republican candidates who don’t fully embrace his “Make America Great Again” philosophy.
The Senate Republican campaign arm, led by Florida Sen. Rick Scott, said it will not get involved in open primaries. But McConnell’s advisers have not ruled out the possibility — even if it draws Trump’s ire.
“You can’t let insanity go unchecked, or it will eat you alive,” said Josh Holmes, a top McConnell political adviser.
“He just wants to win,” he said of McConnell. “If he has to act as a heat shield, so be it.”
Meanwhile, Trump broke his monthlong media blackout Wednesday, calling into Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN and repeating what Democrats have labeled his “big lie”: his insistence that he won the 2020 election.
Meanwhile, Law sought to downplay Trump’s grip on the Republican Party. He noted that Trump’s approval rating among Republican voters — which remains at nearly 80 percent — is similar to that of former President George W. Bush following the Iraq War and the 2007 financial meltdown.
If Trump is involved in the next election, Law said Republicans would lose.
“We will do everything we can to make the focus Joe Biden and the Pelosi-Schumer Congress. We can win with that,” Law said. “The challenge is if there’s a way in which Trump finds a way to make himself the focus next fall.”
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The Associated Press contributed to this article