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- Donald Trump reportedly unleashed an expletive-filled tirade against Mitch McConnell after he recognized Joe Biden’s win.
- “You never really got me. You don’t understand me,” Trump reportedly told the senator.
- A forthcoming book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa details the conversation and the final days of Trump’s presidency.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
After the Electoral College affirmed Joe Biden’s win in December 2020, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered a long-awaited speech on the Senate Floor acknowledging Biden as president-elect after six weeks of refusing to recognize his win.
“The Electoral College has spoken. So today I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden,” McConnell said.
The acknowledgment infuriated then-President Donald Trump, according to an excerpt from a forthcoming book by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa that was obtained by CNN.
Trump was in the midst of mounting several failed legal battles in an attempt to overturn the legitimate results of the race.
Following McConnell’s speech, Trump called the Kentucky Senator immediately, and “spewed expletives,” CNN reported, citing the book.
“And this is the thanks I got?” Trump reportedly asked. “You never really got me. You don’t understand me.”
McConnell ended the call thereafter, telling Trump, “You lost the election. The Electoral College has spoken,” according to CNN’s reporting on the book.
A representative from the Trump Organization did not immediately return Insider’s request for comment.
The reporting tracks with tweets from Trump at the time, in which he targeted McConnell directly by sharing a news article about his allies criticizing the Kentucky senator for congratulating Biden.
“Mitch, 75,000,000 VOTES, a record for a sitting President (by a lot),” Trump tweeted on December 16.
While Trump did indeed secure more votes than any past US presidential candidate, he did not win more votes than Biden’s 81 million.
For weeks after the November election, McConnell stayed silent as Trump launched multiple legal challenges, and affirmed the then-president’s right to pursue lawsuits.
According to Costa and Woodward’s new book, McConnell’s permissive handling of Trump in the immediate aftermath of the election was, in part, a ploy to secure the president’s help in winning the runoff elections for the two US Senate seats from Georgia.
“I have to be gentle,” McConnell reportedly said to William Barr about Trump.
Democratic Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff ended up securing the seats.
The insight into the Republican Party’s post-election infighting is just one of several juicy details promised to be divulged in Woodward and Costa’s “Peril,” which focuses on the final weeks of Trump’s presidency and is set to be released next week.
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