By Sandy Wells, KABC News
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is going to hold his nose and vote for fellow Republican Donald Trump for president in November.
“I’m going to vote for Donald Trump even though I have a lot of differences with him, particularly some of these rhetorical outbursts,” the nation’s most powerful Republican told Doug McIntyre on 790 KABC’s McIntyre in the Morning Show. “I’ve decided that four more years like the last eight are not going to be good for the country.”
McConnell said that the Republican Party has made strong gains in the last eight years under the Obama presidency, with a record number of U.S. House members (since the 1920’s), gaining control of the Senate, 31 governors out of 50, and a record number legislators across the country and control of state legislatures.
“The ‘I hope President Obama will be a one-term president’ quote was taken out of context – and it was not said at the beginning of Obama’s first term but in the second year,” McConnell explained. “What I said was, as any Republican leader would be expected to say, was that I hoped he’d be one term president. But in the mean time, we had a lot to do and during that two years after I said what I said, I negotiated three major bipartisan agreements with the vice president related to taxes and spending. So, I was taken out of context, but that happens all the time in politics. Politically, obviously I would have preferred President Obama to be a one-term president. But I always deal with the government we have, not the government I wish I had.”
McConnell said that unlike President Ronald Reagan – Obama would not compromise with the congressional opposition.
“If this president had been willing to move to the political center like Bill Clinton did when he joined the Republicans in doing welfare reform and actually balancing the budget for three years in a row, we could have done some things together. President Obama is not a centrist. He’s not a pragmatist. He’s a liberal.”
McConnell has a new book out about his life, “The Long Game: A Memoir.” He was a guest on 790 KABC’s McIntyre in the Morning with Doug McIntyre and Terri-Rae Elmer.
