The twilight of Mitch McConnell’s career is rife with contradictions.
McConnell has arguably been among the biggest enablers of Donald Trump’s rise in the Republican Party and American politics. Before Trump was elected in 2016, the senator from Kentucky watered down a bipartisan statement from congressional leaders that condemned Russia’s pro-Trump interference in the 2016 campaign. When Trump was in office, McConnell voted against convicting Trump for withholding aid to Ukraine in an effort to conjure up dirt on Joe Biden’s family. McConnell went on to vote against convicting Trump after his second impeachment for sending an insurrectionist mob to the Capitol to overturn his 2020 election loss. And of course, McConnell endorsed Trump for president this year, even after Trump directed racist insults at McConnell’s wife (in 2023!).
But in recent years, as McConnell has stepped back from Senate leadership, McConnell has occasionally criticized Trump and his supporters — granted, he’s done this either in private or without mentioning Trump’s name.
That trend continued Tuesday, when McConnell acknowledged the toxic origins of the “America First” movement.
During an interview with the Financial Times, McConnell warned about the dangers of isolationism, saying, “We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before World War II.” He added, “Even the slogan is the same. ‘America First’ — that was what they said in the ’30s.”
Speaking of foreign conflicts, McConnell said: “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.”
For the record, the “they” to which McConnell refers in that first quote is the original “America First” movement, which, as Rachel Maddow’s podcast “Ultra” explains, was filled with Nazi sympathizers who plotted to overthrow the U.S. government and to prevent the U.S. from getting involved in World War II or interfering with Hitler’s dictatorship in Germany. McConnell didn’t delve into that history, but that he openly made the comparison suggests he’s well aware of it. It’s worth considering why he chose to help Trump get elected anyway.
McConnell doesn’t seem to want to grapple with that contradiction. His response when asked whether he regrets aiding Trump’s rise was this:
Today, McConnell acknowledges for the first time that he voted for Trump last month, although he can’t bring himself to mention his name. ‘I supported the ticket,’ he says. Asked if he wishes he had done more to prevent Trump from becoming president again, McConnell says: ‘The election’s over and we’re moving on.’
That’s not so different from what he said after Trump’s first impeachment in February 2020, when he told reporters, “We’ve completed it, we’ve listened to the arguments, we voted, it’s in the rearview mirror.”
My reading of McConnell’s mindset is that he’s glad he backed Trump, who presumably will work to usher in an era of conservative, laissez-faire economic policies. But McConnell sounds somewhat regretful about the havoc Trump is likely to wreak on the world.
A profile in courage, he is not.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.