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Senator Mitch McConnell 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 Republican Party.
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 Republican Party.
“We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before World War II,” McConnell told the Financial Times on Wednesday. “Even the slogan is the same, ‘America First.’ That was what they said in the ’30s.”
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 Republican party 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 US 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,” the senator said to the Times. “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.”
In one of many examples of putting the Republican Party 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 characterised the decision as supporting “the ticket” rather than the candidate.
“The election’s over and we’re moving on,” he told the publication when asked if he regrets not doing more to stop Trump from taking office again. “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.”
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 Republicans’ Senate leader by South Dakota’s John Thune and said that he will not seek re-election after finishing the two remaining years in his current term.
