Mitch McConnell Rips Hakeem Jeffries for Calling Trump a 'Fake President'

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Thursday ripped Democrat election denier Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) for calling former President Donald Trump a “fake president” who won an “illegitimate” election.

Speaking on the Senate floor, McConnell publicly slammed Jeffries for purveying false election claims about 2016, as Jeffries has refuted Trump as “fake” and “illegitimate.”

“The newly elected incoming leader of House Democrats is a past election denier who basically said the 2016 election was ‘illegitimate’ and suggested that we had a ‘fake president,’” McConnell said of the new Democrat House leader. “He’s also mounted reckless attacks on our independent judiciary and said that justices he didn’t like have ‘zero legitimacy’”:

McConnell’s speech comes one day after Jeffries was elected the Democrat leader of the House, the second election denier to hold that position, following Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) false claim in 2017 that “[o]ur election was hijacked. There is no question.”

Like Pelosi, Jeffries has continually cast doubt on American elections, an assault on democracy the Democrats have again and again accused Republicans of waging. Breitbart News reported Jeffries’ assaults on Democracy:

At least nine times has Jeffries denied the legitimacy of United States elections. He falsely claimed the 2016 election was “illegitimate,” and that it “artificially” made former President Donald Trump president.

In 2019, Jeffries falsely claimed there was a “cloud of illegitimacy that continues to hang over” the Trump administration and that Democrats should “try to figure out what the heck happened.” In the same year, Jeffries again falsely claimed “the cloud of illegitimacy hanging over 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. grows stronger by the day.”

In 2020, he tweeted Trump’s presidency will never be accepted as legitimate. “History will never accept” Trump “as a legitimate President,” he said.

McConnell’s decision to call out Jeffries’ false election claims is a constant position. McConnell has also accused some Republicans of denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election in which Trump lost to President Joe Biden during the pandemic that gave Democrats an opportunity to improperly change state balloting rules in their favor, according to court rulings in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.