Politics

Donald Trump Endorses Mitch McConnell for the Wrong Job

The billionaire, reality star and longtime possible candidate for a series of political jobs isn't quite sure how Congress works.

By Arit John
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Billionaire, reality star, and perennial possible candidate for a series of political jobs Donald J. Trump isn't quite sure how congressional leadership works, but he definitely thinks Sen. Mitch McConnell should be in charge of something.

Trump dipped his toes into the close Senate race in Kentucky between incumbent McConnell and Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes. The problem is, he nominated McConnell for a job he probably doesn't want — speaker of the House:

The Senate, the body McConnell is in, has a majority leader. That's Democrat Harry Reid's job. The leader of the majority party in the House is the speaker.

The first reaction to this is that Trump is maybe not familiar enough with the way our political system works to be endorsing candidates. At the same time, technically the Constitution doesn't require that the Speaker of the House be a member of the House of Representatives. But in that case, McConnell's best bet would be to lose his seat this November.

Update Monday, 12:54 p.m.: According to the Grimes campaign, this all started with a tweet from the Democrat's twitter account. Trump told Fox & Friends this week that he might do robocalls for candidates like McConnell and Scott Brown, who is running for Senate in New Hampshire. In response, the Grimes account made a "You're Fired" joke, which possibly promoted Trump's "rookie Senator" comment. The Grimes campaign also tweeted:

McConnell, meanwhile, has bigger internet problems to deal with — someone updated his Wikipedia page finally outing him as an otherkin/turtle.

Update Wednesday, 4:02 p.m.:

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.