It is going to be a long, brutal campaign for Democratic Kentucky Senate candidate Amy McGrath, if her appearance this week on CNN is any indication.

McGrath bombed during an interview Tuesday evening when Jake Tapper invited her to explain her 2017 comparison between the election of Donald Trump and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which claimed the lives of an estimated 3,000 Americans. Tapper rightly noted that her remarks undermine her claim to understand why Kentuckians voted for the president.

"Well, what I was talking about was the fact that, you know, nobody really expected President Trump to win. And I was talking also about the entire 2016 cycle," the 2020 Senate candidate said. "Many of us were spurred into action by what happened in 2016, the labeling of each other as, 'They’re all Communist or they're all this or they're all that.' And the fake news, the divisiveness of our country was something I had never seen before.”

Uh, what?

“My husband is a Republican. I’m a Democrat,” McGrath said. “We took stock of that after the election and we said, 'Where are we as a country?' And that way it was the same thing for me was looking at that tragic event in taking stock of: 'Where are we as a country?' So that's what I was saying, and I can see why, you know, folks might be upset about that. But that is what I was saying."

Well, that was about as clear as mud. And what was that bit about Communists?

The bow on this gift to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's reelection effort came at the very end of the CNN interview, when McGrath inexplicably signed off by saying to Tapper, “Great to have you." Naturally, McConnell's team has wasted no time highlighting his challenger's bungled appearance on the cable news network and her incoherent attempt to walk back her 2017 comments about the very voters she needs to win, the ones who brought about 9/11 — I mean Trump's election! — in Kentucky...

For the record, this is what McGrath said in 2017 during her unsuccessful bid for Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District: "And then, of course, the results of the election, we have a new commander-in-chief,” she said at a Meet the Candidates event. “And that morning I woke up like somebody had sucker punched me. I mean, I felt like, ‘what has just happened to my country?' .... The only feeling I can describe that's any close to it was the feeling I had after 9/11. ‘What just happened, where are we going from here?' and it was that just sinking feeling of sadness, and I didn't know what to do."

This is easily more damaging for her than even the time she boasted of being “more progressive” than anyone else in the state of Kentucky. In fact, I wrote yesterday that her 9/11 comparison would likely prove more difficult to explain or defend on the campaign stump in deep, deep red Kentucky than anything else she has said in the past. I didn't expect to be proven right this quickly.