According to an extensively researched report on what makes Senate majority Leader Mitch McConnell tick, New Yorker writer Jane Mayer reveals that the Senate leader has reportedly called Donald Trump “nuts” behind his back — and that he cynically only supports the president because he is left alone to pursue his own agenda while Trump goes through the motions of being presidential.

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Mayer writes, “Bill Kristol, a formerly stalwart conservative who has become a leading Trump critic, describes McConnell as ‘a pretty conventional Republican who just decided to go along and get what he could out of Trump.’ Under McConnell’s leadership, the Senate, far from providing a check on the executive branch, has acted as an accelerant. ‘Demagogues like Trump, if they can get elected, can’t really govern unless they have people like McConnell,’ Kristol said. McConnell has stayed largely silent about the President’s lies and inflammatory public remarks, and has propped up the Administration with legislative and judicial victories.”

Mayer reports that is one side of McConnell, but there is the other side where he openly derides the president as unfit for office.

“Although the two men almost always support each other in public, several members of McConnell’s innermost circle told me that in private things are quite different. They say that behind Trump’s back McConnell has called the President ‘nuts,’ and made clear that he considers himself smarter than Trump, and that he ‘can’t stand him. (A spokesman for McConnell, who declined to be interviewed, denies this.),” Mayer wrote. “According to one such acquaintance, McConnell said that Trump resembles a politician he loathes: Roy Moore, the demagogic former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, whose 2017 campaign for an open U.S. Senate seat was upended by allegations that he’d preyed on teen-age girls. (Moore denies them.) ‘They’re so much alike,’ McConnell told the acquaintance.”

You can read more here.