With less than a year to go before his four-decade Senate career comes to an end, former Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell is coming out swinging for some of President Trump’s top lieutenants.
“He’s got some pretty rabid isolationists over at [the Department of Defense] — you could argue the vice president is in that group,” McConnell told Politico in an interview following Trump’s military strikes on Iran. In what surely counts as the highest order burn among Capitol Hill’s octogenarians, McConnell suggested that none of those people have “read history.”
The interview is McConnell’s latest public attempt to steer Trump toward a more hawkish approach to foreign policy and away from the anti-interventionist voices within the MAGA movement.
Trump’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last weekend have ripped that intraparty debate wide open, with, most notably, Tucker Carlson accusing Sen. Ted Cruz and pretty much all of Fox News of warmongering. “What they are doing is what they always do, which is just turning up the propaganda hose to full blast and just trying to knock elderly Fox viewers off their feet and make them subject to more wars,” Carlson recently told former Trump aide Steve Bannon.
McConnell, meanwhile, praised the Iran strikes—which were not authorized by Congress—from the outset. In a post on X, he commended Trump “for authorizing decisive action and all U.S. servicemembers responsible for carrying it out.”
McConnell’s criticism of Vance comes as the vice president clumsily tries to reconcile his long-standing opposition to U.S. involvement in Middle East conflicts with the political necessity of aligning closely with Trump. Just two years ago, Vance wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that Trump’s best foreign policy was “not starting any wars.” Now, he’s arguing on TV that the difference between the Iranian strikes and past entanglements in the Middle East is that “back then, we had dumb presidents.”
But, thanks to Signalgate, there’s ample evidence that, in private, Vance isn’t in lockstep with Trump on military matters. As the U.S. plotted to attack Houthis in Yemen in a group chat of cabinet officials (and, accidentally, one journalist), Vance wrote in one message, “I think we are making a mistake.” He warned that the president might not be “aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” where he has argued that Europe must be more responsible for its own defense.
In his conversation with Politico, McConnell, who is 83, suggested, without naming names, that some people (wink! wink!) may not remember “what happened in the ‘30s” when isolationist pressures within the U.S. ramped up prior to World War II. “But those of us who do know need to speak up so at least there’s another point of view out there, and that’s what I’m doing as best I can,” he said.
Vance wasn’t the only Trump administration official in McConnell’s crosshairs: McConnell reportedly emphasized during the interview that he had also opposed the confirmations of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and a senior DoD official named Elbridge Colby. Asked whether he talks to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, McConnell said, “not often.”
“There’s only one decider,” McConnell said, “and I think it’s pretty clear that the president has total control of the situation.”