Nancy Pelosi Calls Mitch McConnell's Trump Endorsement 'Very, Very Sad'

The past four decades have seen House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s parallel rise in their respective parties’ leadership on each side of the Capitol.

So when Pelosi was asked during a Friday interview with MSNBC to comment on McConnell’s recent endorsement of former President Donald Trump, she reflected on that history, and summed up McConnell’s decision as “really very, very sad.”

“Sometimes we agreed, sometimes we didn’t,” she began, offering praise for McConnell’s support for aid to Ukraine. “The sad part of it is, Mitch McConnell knows full well that the president was guilty of a crime on Jan. 6.”

“So for him to know how bad the president’s predecessor was on all of this, and then come to the conclusion that he would endorse him when we thought he was going to convict him — the word was, he was close to conviction, and now he’s endorsing — it’s really very, very sad,” Pelosi said.

“And it’s a sad conclusion to a career of strategic — I mean, again, mostly we didn’t agree, but I was respectful of the view that he brought forth and how we could work together,” she went on. “It’s really, in my view, a sad professional tragedy that he had to come around. Why did he do such a thing? Perhaps he’ll explain to the world.”

McConnell announced Wednesday that he would throw his support behind Trump after years of tensions between the two men, which were enflamed by Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election after his loss to Joe Biden.

McConnell once called Trump “morally responsible” for the deadly Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, and said it was a “disgraceful dereliction of duty” for him to refuse to lift a finger to help Congress while it was under attack. The two men have