Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) says Joe Biden is a “good guy,” breaking with former President Trump’s repeated efforts to villainize the president as the corrupt mastermind behind schemes to steal elections and persecute political opponents.
But McConnell, who has endorsed Trump, says there are plenty of compelling policy reasons to oust Biden from office, and has laid out a road map for Trump to use at 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 an audience in Louisville on Tuesday, referring to the more than 20 years they spent together in the Senate and the deals they worked on when Biden was vice president.
Still, McConnell said he’s not a fan of Biden’s record and never bought the president’s efforts to paint himself in 2020 as a moderate who would govern from the center.
“I never thought he was moderate in the Senate, but he ran as a moderate,” he said. “But as soon as the president got elected, he pretty much signed up with the far left of the Democratic Party, which has created another set of a problem for all of you who are in business.
“This has been a regulatory nightmare by this administration,” he argued.
McConnell made clear that he thinks there’s a strong case to make against reelecting Biden without deploying the politics of personal destruction, which Trump has often used against Biden with limited success.
Trump regularly slams the president as “Crooked Joe” and has accused him of all sorts of crimes and underhanded behavior ranging from the theft of the 2020 election, to corrupt business dealings, to taking drugs to pep himself up before the State of the Union address.
Trump has called Biden a “stone cold thief,” a “dumb son of a b‑‑‑‑,” a “mental catastrophe” and has even mocked the president’s stutter.
And he has hinted he will drop more personal invective against his opponent at Thursday’s presidential debate in Atlanta, asking a crowd of supporters at a recent rally, “Should I be tough and nasty and just say, ‘You’re the worst president in history’? Or should I be nice and calm and let him speak?”
Al Cross, director emeritus of the Institute for Rural Journalism at the University of Kentucky and a longtime McConnell observer, said the Senate GOP leader may be sending a message to moderate Republicans who aren’t fans of Trump that they should focus on the policy differences between the candidates instead of their personalities.
“What McConnell might be trying to do here is appeal to Republicans who really don’t like Trump — just as he doesn’t really like Trump — but maybe aren’t fully focused on the policy differences and would be more inclined to vote for Trump, given that stark contrast,” Cross said.
The Kentucky senator, who is a skilled debater in his own right, argues that Biden can be taken down by focusing on his handling of the economy and inflation, and his failure to stop the massive surge of migrants across the southern border.
McConnell pointed out that former Clinton-era Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers warned Biden in May 2021 that “we’re taking very substantial risks on the inflation side” and advised tapping the brakes on fiscal stimulus to keep prices from soaring.
“The president was asking for a massive amount of money, far beyond what most of us thought made any sense,” McConnell said of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda after coming to office.
“Summers … said at the time, ‘You do this, you’re going to have 40-year inflation.’ They did, and we do,” the GOP leader said. “It’s easy to start inflation, and really hard to turn it off.”
And McConnell said Biden’s second big political liability is his record on the border.
“The second big unforced error of the Biden administration and the reason the president is in such a difficult place politically was through a southern border problem,” he said. “There was clearly a change in direction beginning the day the president took office, and you watch the outcome.”
The Department of Homeland Security recorded more than 6.3 million migrant encounters at the southern border between when Biden took office and the start of this year. That has included 300,000 unaccompanied children who have been allowed into the country and placed with sponsors.
“If Joe Biden is defeated this fall, I think the principle reason that will occur is two unforced error: one, the $2.6 trillion creating the inflation, and the other, basically, opening the border,” McConnell said.
Cross pointed out that McConnell has always been open about his personal regard for Biden, despite their major disagreements over policy.
“He’s always been critical of his policies and complimentary of him personally,” he said.
McConnell and Trump had a falling out in December 2020 after McConnell congratulated Biden on winning the election despite Trump’s insisting without evidence that the results had been tainted by widespread fraud.
McConnell waited until after the Electoral College voted before recognizing Biden as the president-elect.
Biden and McConnell worked together to craft several important deals during the Obama administration, when Biden was serving as vice president.
They famously hashed out the deal to make permanent 98 percent of the Bush-era tax cuts and to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff that threatened to send the economy into a tailspin at the end of 2012.
They also collaborated on a deal to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a potential federal default in the summer of 2011, and to extend the expiring Bush tax cuts for two years after the 2010 midterm election.
More recently, McConnell supported several of Biden’s high-profile legislative achievements, such as the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package Congress passed in 2021 and a major investment in the domestic semiconductor manufacturing industry in 2022.
McConnell told his constituents in Kentucky this week that Americans historically have liked divided control of government but also expect lawmakers to work across party lines to get things done.
“We have divided government more often than not since World War II,” he noted. “The American people are not in love with either side, and so they divide the government. And I think that’s not a decision to do nothing, but a decision to look for things you can agree on and do those.
“My biggest critics these days [say] that occasionally I’ve done deals with the other side,” he added.