Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine critiquing Donald Trump for supporting isolationism. But for years, McConnell has enabled Trump’s political power, allowing the president-elect to isolate the country and back America’s adversaries.
McConnell endorsed Trump in the 2024 election, despite Trump’s open disdain for international cooperation and his opposition to NATO allies helping Ukraine resist attacks from Russia.
In his essay, McConnell praised Trump for using force against Syria in 2018, but added, “But Trump sometimes undermined these tough policies through his words and deeds. He courted Putin, he treated allies and alliance commitments erratically and sometimes with hostility, and in 2019 he withheld $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine. These public episodes raised doubts about whether the United States was committed to standing up to Russian aggression, even when it actually did so.”
The criticism of Trump’s longstanding openness to Putin is ironic considering McConnell’s own history on the topic of Russia.
During the 2016 election cycle, then-President Barack Obama’s administration sought to release a bipartisan statement alerting the public to Russia’s attempts to influence the result of that year’s presidential campaign. However, McConnell “dramatically watered down” the document, according to former White House chief of staff Denis McDonough. President Joe Biden, who was involved in those negotiations as vice president, said in a 2018 interview that McConnell “wanted no part of having a bipartisan commitment that we would say, essentially, ‘Russia’s doing this, stop.’”
When Trump was in office, McConnell was muted in response to Trump’s positive overtures to hostile nations.
In a 2018 interview, Trump said that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “understand each other,” despite decades of political oppression and brutality by the North Korean regime.
When journalists asked McConnell to comment on the statement, McConnell replied, “What I think is that it would be wonderful is if we ended up with a denuclearized Korean Peninsula and I hope that’s where this all ends.”
In April, McConnell complained that Trump’s influence delayed passage of funds to help Ukraine. “Our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all,” McConnell lamented. “That took months to work our way through it.”
Just a few months later, McConnell voted to send Trump back to the White House, where he will be free to pursue the foreign policy agenda that McConnell claims he is largely opposed to.
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