Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had a harsh critique for Barack Obama after CNN reported that the former President was less than impressed by Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“I think President Obama should have kept his mouth shut,” McConnell told Lara Trump, daughter-in-law of the impeached president, during a Team Trump Online chat. “You know, we know he doesn’t like much of what this administration is doing. That’s understandable. But I think it’s a little bit classless frankly to critique an administration that comes after you.”
McConnell’s entire interview was torn apart within hours. From falsely claiming that the Obama administration “did not leave to this administration, any kind of game plan” to handle the pandemic. To his wild assertion that Obama should not be able to privately speak on what he believes is “an absolute chaotic disaster.” But what really took things over the edge, the icing on Mitch’s frosty reproach was McConnell’s suggestion that Obama lacked class.
“You know what’s ‘classless’?” MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid tweeted. “Saying the former President of the United States — a grown, free, American man with every right [to] do as he pleases and say what he wants, should ‘keep his mouth shut.’ @senatemajldr McConnell should remember his manners.”
Reid wasn’t alone in her irritation. Former RNC chair Michael Steele also had some choice words for the lawmaker from Kentucky.
“I’m sure Mitch is aware that a grown ass Black man who happens to be a former president has agency to speak his mind on how his successor is managing this crisis, especially since his successor has yet to keep ‘his mouth shut’ about him. And ‘classless’?” Steele tweeted.
Another Twitter user also took up issue with the idea that Mitch McConnell would tell a Black man to silence his opinions. “I’ll say this since no one else will, Mitch McConnell called President Obama classless and said he should shut his mouth because he’s Black. You don’t take a picture smiling hard in front of a confederate flag for nothing.”
Charles Booker, who is looking to unseat McConnell in the U.S. Senate, also found the racial undertones jarring. “I’m sure Mitch would love to tell us why this particular president should keep his mouth shut,” Booker tweeted. “Perhaps it is the same reason a fellow legislator yelled at me on the House floor to sit down, saying that sometimes ‘we’ talk too much. Wonder what that could be about.”
And the rebukes of McConnell weren’t just relegated to Twitter. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel got in the roast as well, saying, “Wait, Obama is classless? He’s joking now, right? I mean, of all the wildly hypocritical things anyone has said about anything during this ordeal…that might take the cake!”