Not long ago

Not long ago, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Donald Trump “doesn’t know much about the issues.” The Kentucky lawmaker also pressed the brash entrepreneur to stop his “attacks on various ethnic groups in the country.” And McConnell said Trump should refrain from “outrageous and inappropriate” attacks on a federal judge, calling into question his Mexican heritage.

On Tuesday, shortly after Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination, McConnell publicly banished all doubts about the New Yorker’s readiness for the White House and trained all of his fire on Hillary Clinton. He portrayed the former reality star as the champion of long-thwarted conservative hopes, and Clinton as an untrustworthy vessel of the status quo. At one point, McConnell even compared the former secretary of state to the notoriously unreliable spokesman of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

“Friends, not since Baghdad Bob has there been a public figure with such a tortured relationship with the truth,” McConnell said told the assembled party delegates in Cleveland.
Americans feel government has betrayed them, and “if Hillary Clinton is our president, nothing will change,” he said.

If he is elected, Trump would sign Republican bills to repeal Obamacare, build the Keystone XL pipeline and strip Planned Parenthood of federal money, McConnell promised.
“With Donald Trump in the White House, Senate Republicans will build on the work we’ve done and pass more bills into law than any Senate in years,” he said.

McConnell, whose appearance on the stage at Quicken Loans Arena was met with scattered but unmistakable boos, emphasized that Trump would also fill the Supreme Court seat held by the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia — as a result of McConnell’s unprecedented blockade of President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, nominated 125 days ago.

“Let’s put justices on the Supreme Court who cherish our Constitution,” the senator said.
McConnell, arguably his party’s best political tactician, took pains to attack Clinton’s honesty, at a time when polls show that many Americans consider her untrustworthy. He also played up the prospect that

Republican Sen. David Perdue told Yahoo News on Tuesday that Donald Trump’s outsider status has left some “uncertainty” about what he would do if elected — a vulnerability as the brash businessman courts wary voters.

In an interview on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the Georgia Republican also dismissed the anti-Trump insurgency at the gathering on Monday as “a little technical argument,” and shrugged off evidence that Melania Trump’s speech plagiarized an address by first lady Michelle Obama as irrelevant to voters worried about their economic struggles.

Perdue, a stalwart Trump supporter, played down Republican concerns that Trump is having trouble uniting the party.

“We’re going to get over this intra-squad squabbling that we have going on right now and realize that we can actually win this thing in November and change the direction of our country,” he said, adding that he hoped the GOP would be united “coming out of this convention.”