Trump ally Lindsay Graham ramps up criticism of McConnell in latest test of the former president's power over Republicans
- McConnell shrugged off Trump's attacks as he negotiated a deal to avert an economic default.
- Trump still holds sway among conservative Republicans, but it's more limited in the Senate.
Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina took a fresh broadside at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Sunday, swiping at the Kentucky Republican's handling of the recent debt ceiling deal with Republicans.
"What we did is promised one thing and delivered another," Graham told "Fox News Sunday," adding he believed the Senate GOP had reversed itself from its pledge to force Democrats to lift the nation's borrowing cap on its own using a party-line maneuver known as reconciliation.
In an implicit rebuke of McConnell, Graham also said that any figure aspiring to be a Congressional Republican leader must have "a working relationship with Donald Trump" or else "you cannot be effective."
"So, I hope we'll get on the same page here," Graham said.
The South Carolina senator's remarks offer a harsh assessment of McConnell's debt-ceiling agreement with Democrats. Graham told Insider on Thursday the deal, which allowed a House vote to affect Senate procedure, "was a bad precedent to set." Even if it solves the debt ceiling issue, the tactic "will come back to haunt the body over time," he added.
The critique is one that's quickly emerged among prominent members of the Republican party. GOP senators including Sens. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley pushed back against the deal before its approval, arguing it eroded the Senate filibuster's 60 vote threshold and let Democrats off too easy.
"I think it was a mistake," Cruz told Insider before Thursday's debt ceiling vote.
Trump continued his attacks on McConnell, savaging him for striking a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and demanding Republicans oust him from power.
"Mitch McConnell is giving the Democrats victory on everything," he said in the Sunday statement.
McConnell in October had pledged that Republicans would not lend further support and pave the way to lift the debt ceiling. But in the end, the Kentucky Republican saw fit to shrug off Trump's attacks similar to how 19 Senate Republicans backed the infrastructure law in August. This time, he struck an agreement to avoid an economic calamity that 14 GOP senators got behind.
"For four months we said [Democrats] were going to use the process of reconciliation to raise the debt ceiling," Graham told Insider on Thursday. "We took that burden away by doing this."