Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, boasted privately to fellow Republicans on Wednesday that their fund-raising efforts had outperformed Donald J. Trump’s, after the former president took aim at the party’s committees in a bid to control its financial future.
The comments from Mr. McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, at a weekly party lunch, which were described on condition of anonymity by three people briefed on the meeting, represented a response of sorts to Mr. Trump trying to throw down the gauntlet on fund-raising. The former president has recently suggested that he would be a better steward of the Republican Party’s money, and that he would use the resources to target incumbent Republicans he finds insufficiently loyal.