"My endorsement of Mitch McConnell at his request, he asked for my endorsement," Trump said, prompting loud boos from the crowd, "brought him from one point down to 20 points up and he won his race in the great state and the great commonwealth of Kentucky. He won it very easily. And I said, 'I wonder if I'm doing the right thing here,' but you know what, I did what I did."
"But he went from one point down to 20 points up very quickly, immediately actually, and he won his race. If you compare that to his other elections, I'm sure you'll see something interesting. But you know what, we got a Republican elected," he added.
Newsweek reached out to McConnell's office for comment.
McConnell won reelection in 2020, defeating Democratic challenger Amy McGrath and her significant fundraising efforts to unseat him. Trump endorsed McConnell's campaign in July 2019 and worked closely with the Senate leader during his four years in office. But since President Joe Biden's inauguration, the two men have clashed repeatedly over the future of the GOP.
Seven GOP senators joined Democrats in voting to convict Trump earlier this month, but the 57-43 majority fell short of the two-thirds needed for a conviction. After voting to acquit, McConnell on February 13 publicly condemned the ex-president and his supporters for inciting the Capitol insurrection on January 6.
"There's no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day," he said on the Senate floor. "The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president. And having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth."
McConnell's rebuke of Trump broke his several year-long run of cautiously avoiding confrontations with the ex-president. He also strongly rejected Trump's baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen" from him through widespread voter fraud.
Trump went after McConnell nearly a month later. On February 17, just days after the Senate voted to acquit him on his second impeachment, Trump called the senator "a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack" in a scathing statement.
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