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Mitch McConnell received a standing ovation after delivering a speech that made an indirect swipe at President-elect Donald Trump.
The outgoing Republican Senate leader bemoaned the current state of the party compared to when Ronald Reagan was in power and cautioned the GOP against isolationism.
“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,” McConnell said at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, on Saturday.
In a nod to Trump’s campaign slogan, McConnell added: “But let’s be absolutely clear: America will not be made great again by those who are content to manage our decline.”
McConnell did not reference the president-elect directly but referred to growing threats from Russia and China and how “influential voices” risk forgetting lessons from the Cold War, Politico reported.
The Kentucky senator, who was presented with the Peace Through Strength award, stressed that America must stand “with friends in need.” “Whether they’re resisting neo-Soviet imperialism in Ukraine, Iran-backed terrorist slaughter in Israel, or PRC hegemony in the Indo-Pacific,” he said.
And he warned of a “dangerous fiction” taking hold of politics in both parties. “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,” McConnell said.
“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.”
The president-elect has taken an isolationist approach to foreign conflicts, believing the U.S. should not get involved unless it has a direct interest in it.
McConnell, who has long been critical of Trump, previously said the MAGA movement “is completely wrong” and Trump has “done a lot of damage” to the Republican party, a book published before the presidential election revealed.
McConnell delivered a withering assessment of how Trump has transformed the GOP to the point where Reagan “wouldn’t recognize” the party today, according to the author.
The revelations emerged in McConnell’s biography by Michael Tackett, titled The Price of Power. The senator gave Tackett personal recordings of his oral histories spanning almost three decades.
“I think Trump was the biggest factor in changing the Republican Party from what Ronald Reagan viewed and he wouldn’t recognize today,” McConnell told Tackett, according to an extract of the book.
He added that Trump has “done a lot of damage to our party’s image and our ability to compete.”
Despite years of acrimony between Trump and McConnell, and his scathing review of Trump in the book, the GOP senator publicly endorsed him as the Republican presidential candidate in March.
