Mitch McConnell said Trump 'put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger' on January 6 and was 'pretty thoroughly discredited' by the attack, book says
- McConnell was exhilarated after January 6 since he thought Trump had been discredited, a book says.
- "He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger," he said after the Capitol riot, the book adds.
In the immediate hours after the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was optimistic that the violent riot had finally discredited former President Donald Trump, according to two New York Times reporters.
"I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself," McConnell told the New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin in the hours after the attack, adding that Trump "was pretty thoroughly discredited by this."
That's according to an excerpt from "This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future," a forthcoming book from Martin and his fellow Times reporter, Alex Burns, that was published by The Washington Post on Monday.
"He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger," McConnell said while standing in a doorway of the Capitol after midnight, according to the excerpt. "Couldn't have happened at a better time."
The book says McConnell also asked Martin, "What do you hear about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment?" hoping to gain insight into whether members of Trump's Cabinet were interested in removing the president.
According to the book, McConnell called Trump a "despicable person" in a meeting with staffers late into the evening after the attack.
But while McConnell hasn't spoken to Trump since December 2020 — once the Electoral College had affirmed then-President-elect Joe Biden's victory — he later backed down from the idea of impeaching Trump, citing a legal argument popular among Republican senators that impeaching a former president was not appropriate.
"I didn't get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference," McConnell told a friend, according to the book.
"If President Trump were still in office, I would have carefully considered whether the House managers proved their specific charge," McConnell said on the floor the day the Senate acquitted Trump. "But in this case, that question is moot. Because former President Trump is constitutionally not eligible for conviction."
A spokesperson for McConnell declined to comment to The Post.