Hannity fixes crosshairs on McConnell
WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump and North Korean premier Kim Jong-un threatened each other with nuclear war on Tuesday, the Twitter war between conservative pundits and Republican lawmakers continued to boil.
Sean Hannity pulled up the app late Tuesday to batter Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for McConnell’s negative remarks about how Trump’s political inexperience hurts the public perception of the GOP Congress.
“YOU are a WEAK, SPINELESS leader who does not keep his word,” the Fox News commentator tweeted at McConnell, directing his followers to a busted link from ABC News.
“(You) need to Retire,” Hannity added.
McConnell told guests at a Rotary Club event in Kentucky on Monday that he found Congress’s reputation as a snailish chamber that hasn’t accomplished anything “extremely irritating.” Trump’s lack of insider understanding in politics led him — and his base — to believe key agenda items would get squared away more quickly than they have been, McConnell said.
“Our new president, of course, has not been in this line of work before,” McConnell said. “And I think he had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process.
“So part of the reason I think people feel we’re underperforming is because too many artificial deadlines — unrelated to the reality of the complexity of legislating — may not have been fully understood.”
Hannity has long been a Trump administration booster. Last week he claimed to be the only Fox News host who was “strongly supportive” of the president. And Hannity’s is one of just 45 accounts Trump follows on Twitter, the president’s favorite line of communication to the public.
On the other hand, Hannity has not maintained such a snug relationship with McConnell. Instead, he repeatedly hammered away at McConnell for not going far enough in his “skinny” health care bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
And in 2016, he complained about the majority leader and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan for their “sarcastic and unsupportive comments” on then-nominee Trump.