Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Wednesday offered his endorsement to former President Donald Trump, potentially thawing the frosty relationship with the two men in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

“It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States," he said in a statement Wednesday after former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley dropped out, leaving Trump without a major challenger. “It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.”

The Kentucky Republican, who announced last week he would step down from the leadership post he's held for nearly two decades, endorsed Trump in the wake of the Super Tuesday contests. He’s the longest serving party leader in Senate history, having led the GOP under four presidents.

Two other GOP senators, Joni Ernst of Iowa and James Lankford of Oklahoma, also endorsed Trump on Wednesday. At least 36 of the 49 Republicans in the Senate have endorsed Trump so far. 

McConnell and Trump have had a complicated relationship since the latter man took office in 2017. Together, the pair reshaped the federal judiciary, including appointing three conservative justices to the nation’s highest court during the former president’s sole White House term, and instituted a sweeping overhaul of the country’s tax code in 2017.

Those were accomplishments that McConnell hailed in his statement: "During his Presidency, we worked together to accomplish great things for the American people including tax reform that supercharged our economy and a generational change of our federal judiciary - most importantly, the Supreme Court."

But the relationship between the two men soured, particularly in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. McConnell laid the blame for the insurrection squarely at the feet of Trump, saying that his “actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty” — though he voted against convicting him during his second impeachment trial, arguing that he was ineligible because he was already out of office.

The two men had not spoken since 2020 when McConnell backed Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election, though talks between their teams resumed recently over an endorsement in the 2024 election.

“Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president,” he said after the impeachment trial in February 2021. “They did this because they had been feld wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry he lost an election.”

“There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” McConnell continued. “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their President.”

In those remarks on the Senate floor, McConnell said Trump “did not get away with anything yet,” and argued that “former presidents are not immune from being held accountable” by criminal and civil courts. Two of Trump’s four criminal trials center on his efforts to overturn the election, including a federal prosecution in D.C. with charges connected to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“I recently reread it. I stand by what I said,” McConnell said earlier this year of his speech in February 2021.

Trump’s lawyers are now making the argument that presidents should have total immunity from all prosecution for actions taken while in office, including reaching so far as to protect them from liability if they dispatched elite Navy commandos to kill their political rivals. The argument is now in front of the Supreme Court.

Beyond their disagreements over Trump’s efforts to stay in power after losing an election, the former president utilized racist attacks to insult McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who is an immigrant from Taiwan. At various points in the last few years, he has called her “Coco Chow” and McConnell’s “China-loving wife.” Chao served as Trump’s Secretary of Transportation the entirety of his term until stepping down in the aftermath of the Capitol attack.

“When I was young, some people deliberately misspelled or mispronounced my name. Asian Americans have worked hard to change that experience for the next generation,” Chao said in a statement to Politico in January of last year. “He doesn’t seem to understand that, which says a whole lot more about him than it will ever say about Asian Americans.”

Trump’s campaign denied the attacks were racially motivated, instead claiming they were connected to her family’s shipping business and “deeply troubling ties to Communist China.”

In October 2022, Trump posted on social media that McConnell “has a DEATH WISH” for supporting legislation that the former president opposed, using his frequent insults for Chao in the same post.

In November of that year, McConnell condemned Trump’s dinner with the Hitler-praising rapper Ye -- formerly known as Kanye West -- and white nationalist Nick Fuentes. At the time, he said the dinner was proof of why he doesn't believe Trump should be elected again.

“There is no room in the Republican party for antisemitism or white supremacy, and anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, are highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States,” he said, according to CNN.

The next week, McConnell condemned Trump and again said he was unfit to be president after Trump called for "the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution."

"Let me just say that anyone seeking the presidency who thinks the Constitution can somehow be suspended or not followed, it seems to me, would have a very hard time being sworn in as President of the United States," McConnell said at the time.

But now, in one of his last acts before ending his leadership tenure, McConnell has affirmed that Trump is the leader of his party and is a more preferential candidate for presidency than Biden, despite the personal insults and the Kentucky Republican's long held apprehensions over Trump’s anti-democratic and far right politics."

McConnell, who plans to stay in the Senate through the end of his term in 2027, in his statement on Wednesday, added that he looks forward “to the opportunity of switching from playing defense against the terrible policies the Biden administration has pursued to a sustained offense towards making a real difference in improving the lives of the American people.