Former US President Donald Trump has urged the GOP to “get a new leader,” calling fellow party member, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), a “disaster”.
“Mitch McConnell is a disaster. The Republicans have to get a new leader. Mitch McConnell allowed this to happen. The ‘un-frastructure’ bill, I call it ‘un-frastructure,’ not infrastructure,” Trump said on “Sunday Morning Futures”.
He criticized the $1.2 billion infrastructure bill, passed in the Senate and signed by President Biden last month, claiming that only nine percent of the spending in the bill would actually go towards infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the bill has been described as allocating between 46 to 80 percent of its cost to infrastructure, depending on how the latter is defined. The plan includes new schools, airports, roads, modernizing energy and utility systems, introducing industrial innovations, improving Internet services and orienting the country's infrastructure towards green technologies.
Trump also slammed McConnell for compromising with Democrats over the debt ceiling.
“So what’s happening is we had a thing called the debt ceiling. And he could have used that to win everything. And he chose not to,” Trump said. “And we have a bigger problem because they have a so-called voting rights bill, which is voting rights for Democrats, because Republicans will never be elected again if that happens, if that passes,” Trump said.
The much-debated draft law on voting reform, also known as the For The People Act, was approved in the House of Representatives in August this year, but Republicans in the Senate have blocked the bill several times.
The legislation involves a number of changes intended to simplify voting procedures as a measure to attract broader segments of society to the electoral process. The bill, at the same time, is viewed by some Republicans as a threat to election integrity.