Senate candidate Rep. Mo Brooks’ (R-AL) coveted Trump endorsement is on the rocks – and he knows it.
On Sunday, Brooks put out a new campaign ad directly targeting Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), aka the “broken old crow” who ex-President Donald Trump has attacked repeatedly while reportedly plotting his ouster.
In the 90-second spot, Brooks pledges to vote against McConnell as Senate majority leader for being a “weak-kneed, debt junkie, open-border RINO Republican and who, worse yet, sells out America for special interest group cash.”
The Senate candidate explicitly puts himself on Trump’s side in “the battle across America: McConnell versus Trump in a war for the heart and soul of the Republican Party.”
“McConnell will do everything he can to defeat me because he’s determined to stop the MAGA movement and Donald Trump’s endorsed candidates for the U.S. Senate,” Brooks declares.
The congressman also calls on his rivals to sign a pledge to vote against McConnell, asking them “Do you stand with grassroots conservatives or Mitch McConnell and the RINOs?”
The ad just happens to come several days after Trump complained in a Washington Examiner interview that Brooks had “disappointed” him by suggesting during a rally last August that GOP voters ought to move past the 2020 election in the face of Trump’s obsession with lying about voter fraud.
Trump told the Examiner that he would have “no problem” ditching Brooks if the candidate didn’t sufficiently peddle Trump’s lies about the election (even though Brooks was one of the leading champions of GOP lawmakers’ efforts to undo the election results).
“I endorsed him because he felt strongly about election fraud,” the ex-president said. “And he still does. But he was inarticulate in the way he said it.”
Trump is also privately upset by Brooks lagging behind his rivals in fundraising, according to the Hill.
Brooks is the third Senate GOP candidate to vow to thwart McConnell’s bid to reclaim his leadership position if Republicans take back the Senate in this year’s midterms.
The other two are Eric Greitens, who’s aiming to replace outgoing Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), and the Trump-endorsed Kelly Tshibaka, who’s gunning for Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) seat.
McConnell finds himself a MAGA target as Trump rakes him over the coals for passing the bipartisan infrastructure bill and, more importantly, denouncing the Jan. 6 Capitol attack Trump incited while attempting to undermine the 2020 election.
