After a flurry of barbed Twitter comments about the veteran Kentucky senator, Trump even hinted that McConnell should consider resigning if he cannot push through the president’s agenda, including a plan to repeal and replace Barack Obama’s signature health care law, widely known as Obamacare.
Asked at a news briefing if McConnell should go, Trump said, “if he doesn’t get repeal and replace done and if he doesn’t get taxes done, meaning cuts and reform, and if he doesn’t get a very easy one to get done, infrastructure, if he doesn’t get them done, then you can ask me that question.”
Trump’s remarks came after he had bombarded McConnell — whose help will be vital to the president as he steers his key bills through Congress — with scornful tweets.
Rather than address the North Korea crisis, the president kicked off his Thursday morning with a tweet blasting McConnell.
“Can you believe that Mitch McConnell, who has screamed Repeal & Replace for 7 years, couldn’t get it done. Must Repeal & Replace ObamaCare!” he tweeted from his summer retreat at a golf course he owns in New Jersey.
Trump had put overhauling Obamacare at the forefront of his presidential campaign, together with building a wall on the Mexican border.
The Republicans control the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives for the first time since 2006.
But the party’s efforts to dismantle a law that they have railed against since its inception in 2010 still ended in a spectacular collapse last month.
Three Republican senators voted with Democrats to doom the draft — a major legislative slap in the face for Trump who, after six months in office, has not won any big battles on Capitol Hill.
The party is riven by internal ideological divisions, and Trump’s own poll numbers are slumping, reducing his ability to sway his own party faithful.
‘Excessive expectations’
The president’s latest outburst was triggered by McConnell’s comments that the Republican billionaire lacked experience in office and had set his expectations too high.
“Our new president, of course, has not been in this line of work before,” the senate leader said in response to criticism of the failure to scrap Obamacare, officially known as the Affordable Care Act.
“I think he had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process,” he said.
McConnell may have further irked the president by sniping at his penchant for using Twitter.
“I’ve been and I will be again today, not a fan of tweeting and I’ve said that to him privately,” he said. “I think it would be helpful if the president would be a little more on message.”
Ignoring that admonition, Trump shot back on Twitter on Wednesday, saying, “McConnell said I had ‘excessive expectations,’ but I don’t think so. After 7 years of hearing Repeal & Replace, why not done?”
His attacks on McConnell echo his previous angry tweets against his attorney-general, Jeff Sessions, the first senator to openly back Trump’s cause when he threw his hat into the ring as a Republican presidential hopeful.