Trump launches fierce attack on former ally
FORMER United States president Donald Trump has launched a personal attack on senior Republican Mitch McConnell, calling him a “dour, sullen and unsmiling political hack”.
The statement is the latest sign of deepening divisions within the party, after Mr McConnell said Mr Trump was the person who incited the deadly attack on the US Capitol last month.
Mr McConnell made that statement after he joined other Republicans in voting against the former president’s conviction during a Senate impeachment trial that accused Mr Trump of provoking the mob into action.
In a statement released by Mr Trump’s political action committee, he said: “The Republican Party can never again be respected or strong with political ‘leaders’ like Senator Mitch McConnell at its helm.”
Disparaging the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, the statement added: “Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack, and, if Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again.”
A spokesperson for Mr McConnell did not immediately return requests for comment. Mr McConnell previously said he voted to acquit Mr Trump because the Senate has no jurisdiction over an ex-president – even though he had rejected a push from Democrats to start the trial when Mr Trump was still in office.
“There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” Mr McConnell said last Saturday, after Mr Trump, the only president to be impeached twice, was acquitted on a 57-43 vote.
“The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president,” he added.
Mr McConnell had remained loyal to Mr Trump during nearly all of his four years in office, when the pair were the two most powerful members of the Republican Party. But, after Mr Trump spent months making baseless claims that election fraud cost him the November election against Democrat Joe Biden, Mr McConnell said that overturning the vote because of objections from the losing side would see American democracy enter “a death spiral”.
Meanwhile, the former Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was reduced to a smoking pile of rubble yesterday.
The building where film stars, athletes and rock stars used to party, and Donald Trump honed his instincts for bravado and hype, was imploded after falling into such disrepair that chunks of the building began peeling off and crashing to the ground.
A series of loud explosions rocked the building at around 9am local time yesterday, and it started to collapse almost like a wave from back to front until it went straight down in a giant cloud of dust that enveloped the city’s beach and boardwalk.
Although the former president built it, the building was owned by Carl Icahn, who acquired the two remaining Trump casinos in 2016 from the last of many bankruptcies.