Senator Mitch McConnell flatly blamed President Trump on Tuesday for the violent rampage at the Capitol on Jan. 6, saying that the mob that stormed the building had been “fed lies” and “provoked by the president” to carry out its assault.
Mr. McConnell’s remarks, on the eve of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inauguration, were the clearest signal yet from the most powerful Republican left in Washington that after four years of excusing and enabling Mr. Trump, he has come to regard the departing president as a force who could drag down the party if he is not firmly excised by its leaders.
Mr. McConnell, who is said to privately believe that Mr. Trump committed impeachable offenses, gave no indication of whether he would vote to convict Mr. Trump at his impeachment trial on a single charge of “incitement of insurrection.” But it was a notable condemnation from the senator who will play a leading role in determining whether enough Republicans join Democrats to find the president guilty, allowing them to disqualify him from holding office in the future.
“The mob was fed lies,” Mr. McConnell said on the Senate floor. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people. And they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like.”
In an apparent dig at Mr. Trump, who continues to insist that he won the election, Mr. McConnell, also called Mr. Biden “the people’s clear choice for their 46th president” and promised to “move forward” with the new administration — though only if it extended an arm to Republicans.
The move was undoubtedly a calculated risk for the leader, whose power has derived from party unity and who has benefited unmistakably from Mr. Trump’s tenure, as the president and Senate Republicans locked arms to cut taxes and confirm hundreds of conservative judges. Public opinion polling suggests that a majority of Republican voters believe Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread fraud. And the president, who remains by far the most popular figure in his party, has threatened to unleash revenge against any elected officials who cross him in the form of costly primary challenges that could fester in the years ahead. Many of them are Mr. McConnell’s closest allies.
The backlash was immediate on Tuesday.
“The only lies that were fed are that Joe Biden won the election,” Amy Kremer, the leader of the pro-Trump group Women for America First and a leader in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, wrote on Twitter, commenting on video of Mr. McConnell’s speech. She described it with a barnyard epithet. “If you think Pres Trump’s base is going anywhere,” she added, “u are sadly mistaken.”
Some of Mr. McConnell’s colleagues pushed back more gently, but their words underscored the significant break within the remarkably cohesive Republican ranks.
“I’m looking for our leadership to recognize that the best thing for the Republican Party and the country are the same,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “Moving on.”
But Mr. McConnell’s allies say he has grown increasingly concerned that if party leaders do not intervene, the president’s campaign to discredit his own defeat could do lasting damage both to democracy and to Republicans’ political fortunes, driving them into a permanent minority in Washington. They pointed out that Mr. Trump had led the party as it lost the White House, the House and the Senate in just a short stretch.
Already, corporate America, long a mainstay of Republican power, has moved to cut ties with many senior Republicans. Suburban voters who fled the party in droves during Mr. Trump’s tenure are likewise looking on in disgust. And if ardent Trump supporters come to believe en masse that elections are rigged, it could depress turnout ahead of the 2022 midterms when Republicans hope to claw back the House and the Senate.
>
“If we spend the midterms and the next presidential election litigating whether Donald Trump won or lost, we are going to lose,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist close to Mr. McConnell.
The majority leader, he added, is “thinking about the threshold question for the American people: Can we trust these Republicans with positions of high responsibility in our government?”
Mr. Jennings acknowledged it was no easy task, but argued the party needed to rebuild around conservative policy principles rather than polarizing personalities.
“Hopefully more Republicans see it his way than the dead-enders who continue to believe the election was illegitimate,” he said.
Yet unlike in the Senate, a majority of House Republicans still strongly support Mr. Trump and appear determined to carry forward his combative brand of politics, including his false claims of election fraud.
Mr. McConnell’s counterpart in the House, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, has wagged his finger at Mr. Trump, saying the president should have spoken out to stop the rampage, but he has not made a full break.
