Trump breaks silence on Democrats’ Senate win by heaping blame on McConnell: ‘Everyone despises him’

Donald Trump finally weighed in on his party’s failure to win control of the Senate late on Sunday morning, making clear that he believes his top rival in the chamber is to blame.

‘It’s Mitch McConnell’s fault,’ the ex-president said bluntly of the Senate Minority Leader. 

It comes after Democratic incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto narrowly defeated Republican challenger Adam Laxalt on Saturday, cementing at least a 50-seat majority for the party with Vice President Kamala Harris‘ tie-breaking vote.

Not commenting on that race, however, Trump blamed McConnell for Republican candidate Blake Masters’ loss in Arizona to Democrat Sen. Mark Kelly the day before.

Sounding off on his Truth Social app, Trump said, ‘Spending money to defeat great Republican candidates instead of backing Blake Masters and others was a big mistake.’

‘Giving 4 Trillion Dollars to the Radical Left for the Green New Deal, not Infrastructure, was an even bigger mistake,’ Trump said.

‘He blew the Midterms, and everyone despises him and his otherwise lovely wife, Coco Chow!’

The nickname for McConnell’s wife, former Trump Transportation Secretary Elaine Chau, has been decried as racist when Trump’s used it in the past.

Republicans’ poorer-than-expected performance in last week’s election has put the party’s fractures on full display. The midterm post-mortem has been filled with finger-pointing as allies of Trump and McConnell each hold the other responsible. 

Trump and others have blamed McConnell for pouring millions into the Alaska Senate race to support GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski against a Trump-backed Republican rival at the expense of candidates whose races would have an effect on the party makeup of the Senate.

Establishment figures, meanwhile, blamed Trump for propping up fringe-right candidates in the GOP primaries. 

‘The people who control the purse strings, Senate Leadership Fund, Mitch McConnell – McConnell decided to spend millions of dollars attacking a fellow Republican in Alaska instead of helping me defeat Senator Mark Kelly,’ Masters told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Friday night.

‘Had he chosen to spend money in Arizona, this race would be over we’d be celebrating a Senate Majority right now.’

The McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund withdrew ad spending from Masters’ race in August.  

Among Masters’ other supporters was Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley, who said the GOP as we know it is ‘dead’ on Saturday night after the Nevada race was called. 

Cortez Masto defeated Republican challenger Adam Laxalt, who had the backing of both Trump and McConnell, after mail-in ballots from reliably blue Clark County and also from Washoe County allowed her to narrowly overtake her rival.

Sources close to Laxalt’s campaign told DailyMail.com on Friday that the GOP ex-Nevada attorney general was ‘bracing for a loss’ – a report that he and his team furiously denied before the results came to fruition.

Cortez Masto’s victory buries Republican chances of taking power in the Senate for the next two years. 

‘The old party is dead. Time to bury it. Build something new,’ Hawley wrote on Twitter just before 10pm ET on Saturday. 

If the GOP wins the only remaining race, Georgia’s December runoff, the chamber’s makeup will be exactly the same as it is now – 50 Republicans, 50 Democrats, and Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote.

Hawley directly laid blame with party leaders in an interview with RealClearPolitics, telling the outlet on Friday: ‘I did not agree with failing to have any kind of an agenda to run on in these midterms.’

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, whose sole mission as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee was to get members of his party elected to form a majority, called the showing a ‘complete disappointment’ on Friday.

‘I think we didn’t have enough of a positive message. We said everything about how bad the Biden agenda was. It’s bad, the Democrats are radical, but we have to have a plan of what we stand for,’ Scott told Sean Hannity on Fox News.

They and other Republican senators have also made clear that the knives are out – and reportedly aimed at McConnell. 

Hawley told RealClearPolitics that he is ‘not going to support the current leadership in the party’ in the looming Senate GOP leadership elections next week, which he and others have called to postpone.

He and fellow GOP Sen. Marco Rubio called for the elections to be postponed, as have Scott and two other Republicans who survived surprisingly fierce electoral challengers – Sens. Ron Johnson and Mike Lee.

‘Holding leadership elections without hearing from the candidates as to how they will perform their leadership duties and before we know whether we will be in the majority or even who all our members are violates the most basic principles of a democratic process,’ Scott, Johnson, and Lee wrote in a letter, according to Politico. 

But Senate GOP leaders are aiming to squash the rebellion and forge ahead next week. 

In another surprising twist defying pollster’s expectations, Democrats also have a nonzero chance of keeping the House of Representatives as of Sunday morning.

President Joe Biden’s party currently holds 204 seats in the new Congress according to the Associated Press, while Republicans control 211.

Key victories in Washington state on Saturday have buoyed Democratic hopes along with the win in Nevada. 

Washington’s conservative 3rd Congressional District was won by moderate Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, an auto-shop owner, over Trump-backed retired Green Beret Joe Kent.

The district was narrowly won by Trump in 2020, and Republican voters there chose to boot their current congresswoman, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, in the GOP primary after she voted to impeach the ex-president in 2021.

Rep. Kim Schrier defeated a Republican primary challenger in Washington’s 8th Congressional District to win a third term. 

Schrier had flipped the seat in 2018, which was under GOP control for over two decades at that point.