McConnell reveals his ‘desert island’ Democratic presidential pick

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he’s “100 percent focused” on stopping Joe Biden’s agenda, but on Tuesday he said there’s no living Democratic president he’d rather be stuck on a desert island with.

Speaking at a Kentucky Chamber of Commerce event in Lexington, McConnell was asked, “you’re stranded on a desert island and you can only have one companion. Your choices are Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter. Who do you choose?”

The Kentucky Republican immediately shot down Carter as a possibility.

“We can rule him out,” McConnell said, even though his questioner noted that Carter could help build a shelter.

As for Obama, who McConnell once noted he planned to make “a one-term president,” he said, “the only thing I didn’t like about him is he had a tendency to tell me to my face what I thought, and one time I had to say, ‘Mr. President, really, that’s not what I think.'”

With Clinton and Biden the remaining choices, McConnell quickly settled on the current president, who served with McConnell in the Senate.

“Biden and I did four bipartisan deals during the Obama administration, I consider him a personal friend. I was the only Republican who went to his son Beau’s funeral, so that would be an easy choice. I think Biden is a first-rate person,” McConnell said.

He was not asked a corresponding question about the two living former Republican presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, but McConnell has blamed Trump for inciting the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6th, despite voting to acquit him in his second impeachment trial.

Trump, meanwhile, has released multiple statements in the past few days blasting McConnell following a report that he’d urged Trump’s then-Attorney General William Barr to speak out against the former president’s false claims of massive voter fraud.

“He never fought for the White House,” Trump complained of McConnell in one, while referring to him in another as a “spineless RINO” — Republican in name only. “Should have never lost the Senate in the first place, thanks Mitch! New leadership is needed, and fast!” he said in yet another statement Tuesday.

McConnell said he didn’t have “any observations” about Trump’s comments. “I’m focusing on the present and the future,” he said.