Donald Trump slammed his former ally Mitch McConnell, telling a crowd in Texas that the recent bipartisan infrastructure deal shows the Republican party needs “someone better.”

       “You need better leadership at the Senate level,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity during a town hall-style event on Wednesday evening. “You need someone better than Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell can no longer do the job.”

       The Senate leader was a crucial ally to the former president throughout his time in office, often tacitly or explicitly backing his most unprecedented actions. However, a public rift has been growing between the two men since 6 January, when a crowd of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol.

       That day, even before the mob breached the building, Mr McConnell refused to go along with more than a hundred of his GOP colleagues and spoke out against their spurious 2020 election challenges.

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       “If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral,” the Kentucky senator said at the time.

       The Senate leader went at Mr Trump even more directly the next month, declaring him “morally responsible” for the 6 January attack on the US Capitol, which he said represented “a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.”

       “There is no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the event of that day,” Mr McConnell said, though he ultimately voted not to impeach the president on riot-related charges.

       In response, Mr Trump slammed Mr McConnell as a “dour, sullen and unsmiling political hack.”

       Their feud has only grown more intense in recent days, after the revelation that the Senate leader urged Trump administration attorney general William Barr to speak out against Mr Trump’s wild election conspiracy theories this fall without alienating the president as a campaign ally during runoff Senate elections in the swing state of Georgia. Mr Barr, speaking with journalist Jonathan Karl in the forthcoming book Betrayal, said he knew Mr Trump’s election claims were “bullsh**” and later announced that the Justice Department hadn’t seen evidence of any substantive problems with the vote.

       The former president claimed falsely that Mitch McConnell could’ve handed him the presidency, even though states had already certified their election results, and suggested the Republican leader lost the GOP both Georgia Senate seats, even though Mr Trump himself spent days relentlessly attacking the state’s elections as corrupt, leading many in the party to worry he was depressing turnout in a razor-thin election. “Had Mitch McConnell fought for the Presidency like he should have, there would right now be Presidential Vetoes on all of the phased Legislation that he has proved to be incapable of stopping,” the former president said in a statement, adding, “Not to mention, he lost two Senatorial seats in Georgia, making Republicans the minority in the Senate.”