BANG: McConnell Takes Powerfully Clear Shot at Trump – Gets Standing Ovation

If one starts with the objective truth that Mitch McConnell should never be on any Democrats’ Christmas card list, it is then safe to move on to some issues on which one can slightly nod with Mitch. The most productive common ground can be found in the central premise that the United States has an essential – and thus active, role to play in guiding global affairs. There is the pragmatic point that, given that wars wreck stuff (Including lives) it is best to fight them “over there” rather than here. Selfishness alone justifies managing issues elsewhere. But along with that duty comes a more subtle implication – it is hard to lecture the world on democratic norms and doing the moral thing without first having one’s own house in order. The commitment guides us both here and abroad. To that end, McConnell took to the Reagan Presidential Library to throw a tomahawk at incoming president Donald Trump’s isolationism. Trump often calls his view “America First” – it appears as though McConnell sees it as nothing more than falling behind.

So it was at the house that Reagan built, in front of the reliably conservative folks who tend to show up at the Reagan library, that McConnell got a standing ovation in pushing back against Trump’s “America First” agenda according to a new report in Politico. McConnell said:

“Within the party Ronald Reagan once led so capably, it is increasingly fashionable to suggest that the sort of global leadership he modeled is no longer America’s place. But let’s be absolutely clear: America will not be made great again by those who are content to manage our decline.”

That silence you would otherwise hear is that accompanying a near war-cry. The context was foreign policy but you will note that McConnell didn’t limit his definition of “decline” and so make of that what you will. The use of “otherwise” is inserted to allow for the standing ovation breaking through what had to be some shock. McConnell went on:

“At both ends of our politics, a dangerous fiction is taking hold — that America’s primacy and the fruits of our leadership are self-sustaining. Even as allies across NATO and the Indo-Pacific renew their own commitments to hard power, to interoperability, and to collective defense, some now question America’s own role at the center of these force-multiplying institutions and partnerships.

Yeah. As I’ve written before, there is no rule stating that the U.S. is and forever will be the world’s leader in much of anything. It is equally true that there is nothing requiring us to maintain a vibrant democracy. Both require renewed commitment over time. One worries that all the goodwill and raw power accumulated over 80 years of post-war economic and military dominance could be lost in only a few years.

Again, all of this is couched in the somewhat safer ground of foreign affairs. But again, McConnell is shrewd enough to know that his carefully chosen words invite the listener to apply the warning more broadly.. He is an institutionalist bent on keeping those institutions relatively intact – albeit only after having demolished the very idea of a balanced SCOTUS by blowing up what had been institutional norms. Be that as it may, he is drawing a clear line as to what he believes to be tolerable as to American posture in the world, with the unsaid but overlapping implications for what happens here at home.

His power is certainly waning, but it’s not nothing – not even close. He still lords over a ton of money in his leadership PAC and he can bestow it on anyone he sees as following his lead. Don’t think that Republicans don’t know and account for the reality. That money becomes even more important given Trump’s notorious need to horde contributions for his own personal political use. Thus the GOP Senate candidates must often look to McConnell for hard cash. No, McConnell still has plenty of power to move the Senate even as he wanes into retirement.

We have seen him take shots at Trump before. I don’t recall one this clear, this sweeping, this uncompromised, nor at this critical a time – with Trump soon to move back into the White House. Oh, and there is that standing ovation. Apparently there remains some disenchantment on the Right with Trump’s direction. “America first” doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone, even on the right. Interesting.

God Bless: I can be reached at [email protected] and on X @JasonMiciak and on Bluesky

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