Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell celebrated another Republican’s primary loss in West Virginia with a little cocaine — floating around a photoshopped shot of his face on Pablo Escobar’s body, that is.
The candidate, Don Blankenship — a former coal baron who went to jail for a year for his role in a 2010 mining disaster that killed 29 people — conceded his primary bid for a U.S. Senate seat Tuesday night. And perhaps no one is more relieved than McConnell, whom Blankenship had dubbed “cocaine Mitch.” The Senate Majority Leader trolled Blankenship by tweeting a photoshopped image of himself borrowed from an ad for the Netflix show “Narcos.”
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“Cocaine Mitch” — a moniker Blankenship used for McConnell in some bizarre campaign ads — is an apparent reference to an incident in which Colombian authorities found cocaine aboard a cargo ship owned by McConnell’s wife’s father.
Blankenship also called McConnell’s family his “China family.” McConnell’s wife and current Secretary of Transportation, Elaine Chao, is Chinese.
The Republican leadership as a whole is pretty relieved that Blankenship lost. After President Donald Trump sent a tweet calling on West Virginians not to vote for him (“Remember Alabama,” Trump said), Blankenship called himself “Trumpier than Trump.”
West Virginia’s Republican Attorney General Patrick Morrisey won the primary and will face off against the incumbent Democrat Joe Manchin in the general election in November.
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