Trump Declares Senate Leader Who Just Acquitted Him Unfit To Lead, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Loyalty Might Occasionally Be Reciprocated

WASHINGTON. Three days after Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell voted to acquit him in his second impeachment trial, former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday issued a lengthy written statement declaring McConnell unfit to lead the party, resolving a long-standing concern within the conservative movement that an act of loyalty might someday be repaid in kind.

The statement, distributed through Mr. Trump's newly created Save America political action committee because the former president remained suspended from the platforms he had used to conduct the presidency, branded the most powerful Republican in the Senate a "political hack" and warned that "if Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again." Allies confirmed the message was meant as gratitude.

McConnell had, in fact, delivered the outcome Mr. Trump needed, voting to acquit on the theory that the Senate could not convict a president already out of office, a timing problem produced in part by McConnell's own earlier decision not to convene the trial while Mr. Trump still held office. Only after securing the acquittal did he add, on the Senate floor, that Mr. Trump was "practically and morally responsible" for the January 6 attack. It was this second remark, and not the favorable vote, that Mr. Trump chose to answer.

In the same statement, the former president blamed McConnell for the loss of two Georgia Senate seats, and with them the Republican majority, in runoff elections held weeks after Mr. Trump began informing Georgia voters that their elections were rigged. He further pledged to support primary challengers against sitting Republicans "where necessary and appropriate," a phrase party strategists understood to mean everywhere.

"This is the reward structure now," said one Republican operative, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid becoming a line item in a future statement. "You can vote exactly the way he wants, and if you say one true sentence afterward, you spend the next two years explaining yourself in a primary." By the following morning, a steady majority of Senate Republicans had declined to repeat McConnell's observation, several instead praising Mr. Trump's continued leadership of a party he no longer formally led.

At press time, the Save America committee, which collected small-dollar donations from supporters each time Mr. Trump denounced a member of his own party, was reporting its strongest fundraising week since the election it had spent two months insisting was not over.