“Team Mitch did everything in their power to endanger our majority in the Senate and threaten the passage of the Trump agenda by ensuring the outcome that we saw last night,” said Andy Surabian, a spokesman for Bannon, who went on to accuse the Senate majority leader of gloating “about the fact that the Republican nominee in Alabama was defeated.”

Prior to the election, McConnell told associates that he wanted to destroy Bannon politically, according to one person familiar with the Republican leader’s thinking. Their goal: to curtail his influence ahead of the 2018 midterms, in which Bannon has vowed to recruit candidates to knock off McConnell-backed incumbents.