Elaine Chao was the secretary of transportation during almost the entirety of the Trump administration, only resigning after the events of January 6th 2021, just two weeks before its end. She held the position of labor secretary during the administration of George W. Bush. She is married to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. She is also the child of Chinese immigrants and came to the US as a child. Her family also founded a massive shipping company. This latter feature opened her up to charges of using her official government position to benefit the family shipping business but this kind of influence-peddling is now routine. The idea that one should go to great lengths to prevent even the appearance of any impropriety is now seen as some kind of quaint old-world fantasy.

Trump’s racist attacks on Asians, especially Chinese, has now taken a personal turn with him attacking Chao after her resignation, and now she is hitting back.

Over the past several months, the leading Republican presidential candidate has launched a series of racist attacks on the wife of the Republican Party’s Senate leader, a woman who once served in his Cabinet.

But while former President Donald Trump’s taunts at Elaine Chao — demeaning her as “Coco Chow” or a variation of Mitch McConnell’s “China-loving wife” — have been mostly met with silence from fellow GOP officials, the main target of them is now speaking out.

“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. “He doesn’t seem to understand that, which says a whole lot more about him than it will ever say about Asian Americans.”
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On at least a half a dozen occasions, Trump has taken to his social media platform, Truth Social, to criticize McConnell’s leadership, and to suggest, among other things, that he is conflicted because of his wife’s connection to China. Last fall, in a message widely viewed by Republicans and Democrats as a threat, he said that McConnell “has a DEATH WISH.”

But the personal attacks on Chao have stood out above the others, both for their overt racism and the relatively little pushback they’ve received. McConnell and his team have not responded. And on the rare occasion where she has been asked about them, Chao has pleaded for reporters to not amplify the remarks. Other Republicans have dismissed the attacks as Trump just being Trump. The former president “likes to give people nicknames,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said in October on CNN.
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But few outside Trump’s inner circle dispute that the ex-president’s posts about Chao are racist. And privately, GOP officials have raised concerns that his rhetoric is not mere background noise but an illustration of the way he has fundamentally altered the spectrum of accepted political discourse.
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The latest Trump attack — a suggestion that Chao may have been responsible for President Joe Biden bringing classified documents with him to his post-vice presidency office in D.C.’s Chinatown neighborhood — came amid a series of shootings that targeted Asian American communities.
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“It’s a bizarre obsession he has with her,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist and former McConnell aide. “If you heard someone on the street making these rants you’d expect to see them in a sandwich board or a straight jacket.”

None of the three principals involved (Trump, McConnell, and Chao) are sympathetic characters. Trump is unquestionably awful, McConnell is an unprincipled, ruthless, and power-hungry politician, and Chao has been an enabler of both of them. So in one sense, their feuding is something to be relished. The big negative is that given Chao’s ethnicity, the racist attacks on her will have a spillover effect of encouraging violence against Asians in general by Trump supporters.