- McConnell told reporters Trump was looking for a scapegoat ahead of the Georgia Senate runoffs.
- "He's always setting up somebody to blame it on," McConnell told New York Times reporters in an interview for a coming book.
- McConnell's worst fears happened and the GOP lost the runoffs and control of the Senate.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters ahead of Georgia's critical Senate runoff races in 2021 that he felt President Donald Trump was looking for someone to blame if the party lost the contests that would decide who controlled the chamber.
"What it looks to me like he's doing is setting this up so he can blame the governor and the secretary of state if we lose," McConnell told New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns for their new book, "This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future." "He's always setting up somebody to blame it on."
McConnell's comments, first reported in an excerpt obtained by CNN, underline the tensions between the nation's two most powerful Republicans as it became clear Trump would be a one-term president and McConnell could lose his Senate majority.
Both scenarios ended up becoming reality. McConnell and America found out that Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff would flip both of Georgia's seats on January 6, 2021, handing Democrats control of Washington on the day of the violent Capitol siege.
A former top McConnell aide previously told Insider that January 6 was "a turning point" for Trump and McConnell and that their relationship "has not recovered." McConnell has said he has no higher ambitions than leading the Senate and Trump's efforts to overturn the election and his complaints about Georgia specifically helped fuel the party's twin losses in Georgia.
Before the races, Trump trained his ire on Georgia's Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for not backing his debunked claims about voter fraud and not doing more to prevent Biden from getting certified as the winner of the state's election.
More than 752,000 Georgians who voted in the razor-thin presidential election didn't vote in the January 2021 runoffs, an Atlanta Journal Consitution analysis found. The no-shows were disproportionately more likely to be Republican voters.
A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment. "This Will Not Pass" will go on sale on May 3.