Mitch McConnell has shrunk from the spotlight since relinquishing the GOP leadership last year—but the weekend’s bunker-buster strikes on Iran and Donald Trump’s subsequent visit to the NATO summit have pulled the Kentuckian out of his semi-retirement rocking chair and into flamethrower mode.
And, right in McConnell’s firing line, was President Trump’s number two, JD Vance, who was spared little sympathy.
“[Trump’s] got some pretty rabid isolationists over at DoD—you could argue the vice president is in that group,” McConnell said, skewering Vance in the Politico interview. “None of those people who’ve read history.”
The Daily Beast has approached Vance for comment but has not received a reply at the time of publication.
McConnell’s feud with Trump dates back to 2016, when “McConnell-world” went up against “Trumpland” for the soul of the GOP. The clash intensified when McConnell publicly certified Joe Biden’s 2020 victory and blamed Trump for the Jan. 6 riot, widening the party’s divide between institutional conservatism and culture-war populism.
Trump, as he so often does, resorted to insults, describing McConnell last year as an “Old Crow”—a nickname which backfired, with the Kentucky senator proudly turning it into a badge of honor.
The octogenarian now chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that doles out defense dollars. From that perch he appears to be mounting a public campaign to drag Donald Trump back toward the interventionist creed of peace through strength that defined the party before media commentators and podcasters like Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and “America First” hashtags took over.
Rather than whisper advice over dinner, McConnell has unleashed floor speeches, committee diatribes, and this 40-minute chat with Politico.
The message is constant: replicate the Iran success in Ukraine, out-spend Moscow and Beijing, and don’t let Vance or other “history-light” aides fog up the president’s thinking.
“The strongest deterrence is denying an adversary’s objectives through military means,” McConnell declared on the Senate floor, adding that preaching at NATO partners means nothing unless Washington fattens its own defense ledger. He praised Trump for goading Europeans into higher budgets but argued that means “we need to do the same.”
“We need to not just preach to our allies, we need to do the same,” McConnell told Politico, who admitted his view doesn’t make him popular in the commander-in-chief’s club.
“Most of [Trump’s] advisers don’t agree with what I’m saying,” McConnell said, conceding he no longer has “the megaphone” he once did as he enters the final stages of a congressional career that began during Ronald Reagan’s second term in January 1985.
Instead, he says, he has “the freedom to do it that I would not have had if I had still been leader.”
Health setbacks—flaring childhood polio and hearing loss—may have slowed him physically, but McConnell still rattled off defense-spending as a slice of GDP from Harry Truman to Joe Biden. “We’re now spending less than Jimmy Carter was in his last year,” he said.
Would Trump even know that? “That is why some of us need to argue a different point of view,” McConnell said, noting social media posts are no substitute for hard numbers.
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