Mitch McConnell, the majority leader in the Senate and a Republican from Kentucky, delivered scathing statements against President Trump and his Republican party colleagues on Wednesday afternoon. He said of Congress: “We cannot just declare ourselves a national board of elections on steroids.”
“We’ll either hasten down a poisonous path where only the winners of an election actually accept the results or show we can still muster the patriotic courage that our forebears showed, not only in victory, but in defeat,” he said.
Following the first of multiple GOP objections Wednesday, which challenged the Arizona election results, a state Trump narrowly lost, his remarks sparked debate in the Senate.
“If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral,” McConnell said.
The president and his friends were criticized by McConnell, a fiercely partisan figure who has mainly supported Trump during his administration, for attempting to overturn the results, a move that he claimed would “destroy our nation forever.”
“We cannot keep drifting apart into two separate tribes with a separate set of facts and separate realities,” he said.
Trump and his associates have claimed that significant election fraud occurred in the election in November. However, election officials and William Barr, Trump’s attorney general at the time of the election, have stated that there is no proof of massive election fraud this year.
After the Nov. 3 election, Trump’s right to use the legal system was supported by McConnell.
Democrat attempts to overturn election outcomes in the past were allegedly treated unfairly by the media, according to McConnell.
Following McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York noted that his colleague had attempted to quell the “insurrection” among Trump’s Republican allies but cautioned that the damage had already been done and that a section of the Republican Party was attempting to use a “attempted coup.”