Controversial McConnell bio debuts days before election

A new biography of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, The Price of Power, hit shelves on Tuesday—just a week before the Nov. 5 election day. Author Michael Tackett is also who is also a deputy Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press. In the book, he examines McConnell’s childhood battle with polio and his life and times as the GOP’s leader in the Senate.

More controversially, the book also includes the Senate Minority Leader’s opinions on the Make America Great Again movement, Dobbs v. Jackson, and federal charges against former President Donald Trump. WORLD reviewed a preview copy of the book.

What did McConnell say?

• Tackett writes several times in the book that McConnell thought his party had suffered a blow, politically, from the Dobbs decision. The 2022 Supreme Court decision overturned Roe v. Wade, clearing the way for state legislation to protect unborn babies from abortion. The senator believed it had pumped up Democratic campaigns across the country for the 2022 midterm elections.

• The MAGA movement was completely wrong, McConnell said. He thought Trump and his followers had hurt Republicans’ ability to compete against Democrats politically.

• The former president’s behavior on Jan. 6, 2021, seemed to merit criminal prosecution, McConnell told Tackett.

How are other Republicans responding to the book? Trump Campaign Senior Advisor Brian Hughes responded to the remarks in the book. In a one-sentence statement to WORLD, he wrote that McConnell “has endorsed President Trump to return to the White House as the 47th President of the United States.”

Senator Mike Lee, R-Utah, called McConnell’s attacks on Trump unworthy of his job as a top GOP senator. Any Republican leader shouldn’t be criticizing a Republican candidate in the days leading up to a close election, Lee said. The Republican’s leader in the Senate is supposed to help the party, not undermine it, he added.

Dig deeper: Read Leo Briceno’s report in The Stew about how former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, has made criticism of Trump a key part of his Senate platform.