Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Joe Biden is a “good guy,” dismissing repeated attempts by former President Trump to portray the president as a villain as behind a conspiracy to rig the election and persecute his political opponents.
But McConnell, a Trump ally, said there are plenty of compelling policy reasons to remove Biden from office, laying out a road map that Trump will use in Thursday’s debate and on the campaign trail to attack Biden’s record in office.
“I know Joe Biden pretty well. He’s a good guy, I like him personally,” McConnell told a crowd in Louisville on Tuesday, referring to their more than two decades together as senators and the deals they worked on together when Biden was vice president.
Still, McConnell said he doesn’t like Biden’s record and never bought into the president’s efforts in 2020 to portray himself as a moderate who would govern from the center.
“I didn’t think of him as a moderate in his time as a senator, but he ran as a moderate,” he said, “but as soon as he was elected president, he seemed to join the far left wing of the Democratic Party, which created new problems for the business community.”
“This is a regulatory nightmare from the current administration,” he argued.
McConnell made it clear he believed he had a strong case for opposing Biden’s reelection if Trump had not resorted to the kind of personal destruction politics he has often used against Biden with little success.
Trump has regularly denounced the president as “Bad Joe” and accused him of all sorts of crimes and wrongdoing, from the theft of the 2020 election to corrupt business deals to taking drugs to get high before the State of the Union address.
Trump has called Biden a “cold-blooded thief,” a “mindless idiot” and a “mental disaster” and has also mocked the president’s stutter.
Trump also hinted he plans to make more personal insults about his opponents at Thursday’s presidential debate in Atlanta, asking supporters at a recent rally: “Should I be harsh and nasty and say, ‘You’re the worst president we’ve ever had,’ or should I be nice and gentle and let them talk?”
Al Cross, director emeritus of the University of Kentucky’s Rural Journalism Institute and a longtime McConnell observer, said the Senate Republican leader may be sending a message to moderate Republicans who aren’t Trump supporters that they should focus on policy differences, not the candidates’ personalities.
“What McConnell may be trying to do here is appeal to Republicans who really dislike Trump, not that he really dislikes Trump himself, but who aren’t really paying attention to the policy differences and may be more inclined to vote for Trump given the stark contrast,” Cross said.
The Kentucky senator, a skilled debater himself, argues he can beat Biden by focusing on the economy, his handling of inflation and his failure to stop the flood of migrants crossing the southern border.
McConnell noted that Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers warned Biden in May 2021 that he was “taking very big risks on the inflation side” and advised him to put the brakes on fiscal stimulus to curb rising prices.
“The president has asked for huge amounts of money, far more than most people would consider meaningful,” McConnell said of Biden’s “Build Back Better” policies after taking office.
“Mr. Summers said at the time, ‘If we do this, we’ll have 40 years of inflation.’ They did, and we’re doing it,” the Republican leader said. “It’s easy to create inflation, but it’s very hard to stop it.”
And McConnell said Biden’s second biggest political liability is his record on the border.
“The second big, self-destructive mistake of the Biden administration, and the one that has put the president in a difficult political position, is the southern border,” he said. “The president clearly began to reverse course from the day he took office, and we are seeing the results.”
The Department of Homeland Security has recorded more than 6.3 million encounters with migrants at the southern border between Biden’s inauguration and the start of this year, including 300,000 unaccompanied children who were allowed into the country and placed with sponsors.
“If Joe Biden loses this fall, I think the main reason it’s going to be because of two self-defeating mistakes: one, the $2.6 trillion that caused inflation, and the other, basically open borders,” McConnell said.
Cross noted that despite the two men’s deep differences over policy, McConnell has always publicly expressed his personal admiration for Biden.
“They’re always critical of his policies but they praise him personally,” he said.
McConnell and Trump had a falling out in December 2020 after McConnell congratulated Biden on his election victory even as Trump claimed without evidence that the results were tainted by widespread fraud.
McConnell waited to certify Biden as the next president until after the Electoral College votes were cast.
Biden and McConnell worked together to strike several key deals during the Obama administration, when Biden served as vice president.
They famously hammered out a deal that made 98 percent of the Bush-era tax cuts permanent and averted the so-called fiscal cliff that threatened to send the economy into a tailspin at the end of 2012.
They also worked together on an agreement to raise the debt ceiling and avert a potential federal default in the summer of 2011, and to extend the expiring Bush tax cuts for two years after the 2010 midterm elections.
More recently, McConnell supported some of Biden’s high-profile legislative accomplishments, including the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package passed by Congress in 2021 and major investments in the domestic semiconductor manufacturing industry in 2022.
McConnell told Kentucky voters this week that Americans have historically preferred divided government, but at the same time expect lawmakers to work together across party lines to get things done.
“We’ve often had divided government since World War II,” he noted, “because the American people have no attachment to either side, so we have divided government. And I think that’s not a decision to do nothing, but a decision to find something we can agree on and then do it.”
“My biggest critic these days is [say] “Sometimes we make deals with the other side,” he added.
