McConnell takes another swipe at Trump and warns even his slogan echoes the 1930s

Story by Daniel Hampton. December 12, 2024.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (T-KY) reportedly said that President-elect Donald Trump’s victory puts Americans in “a very, very dangerous world,” stressing that he plans to spend his final two years in the Senate pushing back against the growing Trump-fueled isolationism within the GOP.1

The 82-year-old Kentucky Republican, who last month stepped down from his role as the longest-serving party leader in Senate history, has a complicated record with the incoming president. While McConnell has worked to significantly move the country to the right — much of it under the first Trump administration — he is no fan of Trump and his isolationist worldview that’s spreading throughout the Trump Party.

“We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before World War II. Even the slogan is the same, ‘America First.’ That was what they said in the ’30s.” – McConnell told the Financial Times on Wednesday.

He made similar comments before the election, telling Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in April that the world is “more dangerous” than before World War II due to the increase in and evolution of terrorism. The interventionist senator highlighted how Trump and the current GOP are regressing to pre-World War II isolationism — a foreign policy position that opposes American military intervention in other countries’ political affairs, including war.

Trump and his allies have called for the U.S. to stop sending money to Ukraine, a country that’s been battling Russia now for more than two years. The former and incoming president has also argued that enemies within the U.S. are more dangerous than Russia and China, a claim McConnell said he vehemently disagrees with.

“The cost of deterrence is considerably less than the cost of war. To most American voters, I think the simple answer is, ‘Let’s stay out of it.’ That was the argument made in the ’30s and that just won’t work. Thanks to [former President Ronald] Reagan, we know what does work — not just saying peace through strength, but demonstrating it.”

Like All Good Trumpers, It’s “Party Over Country”

In one of many examples of putting the GOP first, McConnell told Welker in April that even though he does not personally like Trump, he would support him as the Republican presidential nominee. The senator told the Times that he voted for him in November but characterized the decision as supporting “the ticket” rather than the candidate.

“The election’s over and we’re moving on. He has an enormous audience, and he just won a national election, so there’s no question he’s the most influential Republican out there.” he told the publication when asked if he regrets not doing more to stop Trump from taking office again.

Trump is no fan of McConnell either, recently calling him a “disgrace” for endorsing him.

McConnell, who has had multiple health scares in recent years, was replaced as the GOP’s Senate leader by South Dakota’s John Thune and said that he will not seek reelection after finishing the two remaining years in his current term.

McConnell says the world is ‘more dangerous now than before World War II’: Full interview

Apr 28, 2024 #Republicans #Trump #MitchMcConnell Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) joins Meet the Press to discuss aid to Ukraine, abortion, Donald Trump and the future of the Republican Party.

Mitch McConnell Trashed ‘Despicable’ Trump In Private After 2020 Election, New Book Says / HuffPost Latest News

But McConnell has still endorsed Trump’s 2024 run against Kamala Harris. MARY CLARE JALONICK Oct 17, 2024, 07:15 AM EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mitch McConnell said after the 2020 election that then-President Donald Trump was “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” a “despicable human being” and a “narcissist,” according to excerpts from a new biography of the Senate Republican leader that will be released this month.

McConnell made the remarks in private as part of a series of personal oral histories that he made available to Michael Tackett, deputy Washington bureau chief of The Associated Press.

Tackett’s book, “The Price of Power,” draws from almost three decades of McConnell’s recorded diaries and from years of interviews with the normally reticent Kentucky Republican.

The animosity between Trump and McConnell is well known — Trump once called McConnell “a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.”

But McConnell’s private comments are by far his most brutal assessment of the former president and could be seized on by Democrats before the Nov. 5 election. The biography will be released Oct. 29, one week before Election Day that w

Privately, he said in his oral history that “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump left office, and that Trump’s behavior “only underscores the good judgment of the American people. They’ve had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him.”

“And for a narcissist like him, that’s been really hard to take, and so his behavior since the election has been even worse, by far, than it was before, because he has no filter now at all.”

Before those Georgia runoffs, McConnell said Trump is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered and can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie.”

Trump was also holding up a coronavirus aid package at the time, despite bipartisan support. “This despicable human being is sitting on this package of relief that the American people desperately need.” ” McConnell said in his oral history, “

Years of doubts and criticism

In a statement to the AP on Thursday, McConnell referenced two fellow Republican senators — JD Vance of Ohio, the vice presidential nominee, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both of whom are strong Trump allies after harshly criticizing him during his first run in 2016.

“Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now,” McConnell said.

McConnell also had doubts about Trump from the start. Just after Trump was elected in 2016, as Congress was certifying the election, McConnell told Biden, then the outgoing vice president, that he thought Trump could be trouble, Tackett writes.

In 2017, as Trump publicly criticized McConnell for the Senate’s failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Trump and McConnell had a heated argument on the phone. Weeks went by with no contact. Then Trump invited McConnell to the White House and called a joint news conference without telling him first. McConnell said the event went fine, and “it’s not hard to look more knowledgeable than Donald Trump at a press conference.”

He blamed Trump after House Republicans lost their majority in the 2018 midterm elections, Tackett writes. Trump ”has every characteristic you would not want a president to have,” McConnell said in an oral history at the time, and was “not very smart, irascible, nasty.”

In 2022, as Trump continued to criticize McConnell and made racist comments about his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, McConnell told Tackett that I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be criticized by than this sleazeball.”

“Every time he takes a shot at me, I think it’s good for my reputation,” McConnell said.

Also in 2022, McConnell said in his oral history that Trump’s behavior since losing the election had been “beyond erratic” as he kept pushing false allegations of voter fraud. “Unfortunately, about half the Republicans in the country believe whatever he says,” McConnell said.

  1. @RalphHightower: Finally, McConnell finds his balls to stand up to Trump. ↩