Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury claims the Senate majority leader rebuffed the president’s overtures during their summer feud.
Donald Trump’s staff reportedly extended an olive branch to Mitch McConnell to resolve tension between the two last summer, and the Senate majority leader blew him off — to get a haircut.
That juicy nugget appears toward the end of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, a gossipy new account of the inner workings of the Trump White House during its first year. The detail appears in the epilogue, where former Trump adviser Steve Bannon recounts what he sees as Trump’s perplexing endorsement of the McConnell-backed establishment candidate Luther Strange in the Republican runoff for the Alabama Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions:
After all, McConnell and the president were barely on speaking terms. From his August “working holiday” in Bedminster, the president’s staff had tried to organize a makeup meeting with McConnell, but McConnell’s staff had sent back word that it wouldn’t be possible because the Senate leader would be getting haircut.
The timing of the alleged snub would make sense. The Republican Senate had just failed to repeal Obamacare at the tail end of July, and McConnell had criticized Trump for his “excessive expectations” in early August. Trump fired back on Twitter with a burn of his own against McConnell.
By now it’s well known that Wolff’s book is loaded with salacious details that have come under scrutiny for nebulous sourcing and potential inaccuracies.
Bannon is also one of the key on-the-record sources for the book, and some of its most explosive details (his speculation about Donald Trump Jr.’s “treasonous” meeting with the Russians, for example) are Bannon’s words.
This McConnell detail, too, appears to come from Bannon’s musings in the epilogue about Trump’s support for Strange, who lost to Bannon-backed Roy Moore (who, of course eventually lost to Democrat Doug Jones).
According to Fire and Fury, Bannon reportedly didn’t get why Trump backed Strange, because Strange was behind in the polls, and he hadn’t demanded anything of McConnell in return. According to Bannon, Trump said he supported Strange because they were friends. “He said it like a nine-year old,” Bannon claims in the book.
The White House has blasted “Sloppy Steve” — Trump’s new nickname for his former top aide — for his participation in the book, though Bannon, at least so far, hasn’t challenged Wolff’s quotes. That doesn’t mean Bannon’s contribution is free of agenda or untruths, though there’s a sweet irony to McConnell choosing a haircut over a sit-down with Trump.
But McConnell, at least, seems to be reveling in the Trump-Bannon feud. Or maybe just in the fall from grace of the man who vowed to unseat him.
http://pic.twitter.com/683UJFlKL4
— Team Mitch (@Team_Mitch) January 3, 2018
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