Mitch McConnell’s Teachable Moment

Mitch McConnell has not grown subtler with time.

“He's got some pretty rabid isolationists over at DoD — you could argue the vice president is in that group,” the 83-year-old former Senate Republican leader told me this week, alluding to President Donald Trump’s top national security advisers. “None of those people who’ve read history.”

McConnell has agreed to few national interviews since stepping down from his leadership post last year. However, after Trump authorized the bunker busters that degraded Iran’s nuclear capacity last weekend and quickly forced Tehran into a ceasefire, McConnell saw an opening to send a message to a president he’s long detested and who dismisses him as “the old crow.”

Now chairing the Appropriations panel that oversees defense spending, the Kentucky Republican said he’s not interested in litigating “relationship issues with Trump” but rather persuading him of “what works and what doesn’t.”

And McConnell’s hope is that after the success Israel and the U.S. have jointly had over the skies of Iran, he can be something of an evangelist to convert Trump to the peace-through-strength gospel of interventionism that the octogenarian lawmaker has prioritized in the final Congress of his four-decade Senate career. Particularly with Trump irritated at broadcaster Tucker Carlson, who McConnell faults for polluting so many Republican minds, the senator sniffs opportunity.

It's a version of the positive reinforcement — head-patting would be a less charitable description — that some of his colleagues wield on the site formerly known as Twitter when they want to steer Trump in a certain direction.

McConnell is not a very online sort, though.

So in a floor speech, committee hearings and 40-minute interview off the Senate floor this week, McConnell sought to use this moment to nudge Trump and his inner circle to apply the lessons of Iran to Ukraine and, more broadly, to recognize the value of defense investments that can produce drone technology and perhaps the next generation of the B-2s that soared undetected above Iran.

Coming the same week as the NATO summit, McConnell praised Trump’s cajoling Europe into higher defense spending, but said that was all the more reason for the U.S. to spend more in the coming years on defense.

“We need to not just preach to our allies, we need to do the same,” he said.

“Most of [Trump’s] advisers don't agree with what I’m saying,” McConnell said, and he acknowledged lacking “the megaphone” he once wielded. But now, he said, he has something else: “the freedom to do it that I would not have had if I had still been leader.”

McConnell’s hearing has declined and, with his childhood polio flaring up, he’s taken to wearing black sneakers with his suits and at times hooks his arm under an aide or police officer as he makes his way around the Capitol. Even with the help of a microphone, his voice can be hard to pick up at committee hearings.

Yet he very much knows his brief and, in our conversation, unspooled the history of American defense spending as a percentage of gross domestic product since World War II.

“We're now spending less than Jimmy Carter was in his last year,” McConnell said, with what passes for him sounding incredulous.

Do you think Trump even knows that, I asked. The president has never been a deficit hawk and, with his love of flashy defense hardware, would certainly have no problem increasing the Pentagon budget, I ventured.

“That is why some of us need to argue a different point of view,” McConnell responded.

What’s striking is that he’d rather do it via floor speeches and this column than over a meal with Trump or on the phone with the always-accessible president.

I asked McConnell if he had an intermediary to communicate with Trump — perhaps their shared friend from Arkansas, Senator Tom Cotton — but the Kentuckian suggested I was missing the point.

“I'm delivering it publicly,” he said with a laugh. “I don't think whispering in somebody’s ear is what ought to be done right now. I think you need to build support. The way you do that is publicly.”

Which gets to the heart of McConnell’s concerns — and why he thinks the GOP’s Reaganites must speak out.

He views Trump, understandably, as wholly up for grabs on most policy issues but also vulnerable to the arguments of those around him. And McConnell sees mostly just isolationists in Trump’s ear. This, of course, would amuse the likes of Carlson and Steve Bannon, who see the power of Fox News, Israel’s government and their supporters in the U.S. as a formidable axis of influence around the president.

Yet McConnell feels outnumbered, believing that Vance, Trump friend-turned-negotiator Steve Witkoff and much of the Pentagon are determined to push the president toward a move dovish posture abroad. Strikingly, the senator indicated he has little contact with perhaps the most influential national security voice in the administration and the man who McConnell once hoped would defeat Trump in a GOP presidential primary in time long, long ago.

Do you talk to Secretary Rubio, I asked.

“Not often,” said McConnell.

He didn’t take much of a victory lap over his votes to oppose the confirmation of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, they of persistent bad coverage. Yet McConnell reminded me he had opposed both of them, as well as Elbridge Colby, a senior DoD official who has long argued for the U.S. to deemphasize Europe and focus on Asia.

As McConnell pointed out, though, “there's only one decider and I think it's pretty clear that the president has total control of the situation.”

Trump, said the senator, should better grasp now the power of projecting force and recognize that Moscow and Beijing were watching the events of the last two weeks.

“The strongest deterrence is denying an adversary’s objectives through military means,” McConnell said on the floor. “Israel is restoring this deterrence in the Middle East. Ukraine is achieving it by holding its own against Russia. But it needs help.”

This is where McConnell is unlikely to convert Trump.

The president has shown little appetite to keep sending weapons to Kyiv and has hardly been shy about his appetite for a Nobel Peace Prize, whether it’s for the ceasefire he brokered between Iran and Israel, an eventual deal he can reach between Russia and Ukraine or a handful of other global hot spots he has mentioned in hopes of drawing Oslo’s attention by way of his Truth Social feed.

“I worry about trying to broker a deal between these two adversaries,” McConnell said of Kyiv and Moscow, because “the Russians are going to demand what will be described as defeat.”

McConnell said he would like to see his successor as GOP leader, Sen. John Thune, bring up the far-reaching sanctions bill on Moscow that Sen. Lindsey Graham has sponsored. But McConnell seemed less enthused about its potential impact than Graham, who told me this week his latest hope is that Thune will bring it to the floor after Congress breaks for July 4.

“My birthday is July 9th, that’s when I want to do it,” Graham said.

McConnell also, in our conversation, warned Trump away from attempting to “micromanage the relationship” between Israel and Iran.

“I’d be satisfied with having played a role in significantly damaging Iran,” he said. “But to try to intervene in cutting a deal with two countries that are so radically different in their approaches seems to me a bridge too far. And I know the president always thinks he can figure out how to make a deal. I don't see how we by intervening and trying to tell those guys how to — would work.”

Where McConnell is more likely to find success is pushing Trump to embrace higher defense outlays in the annual appropriations bills, particularly now that the Europeans are spending more. The former Senate leader marveled at Germany’s turn toward militarization and reminded me of the role he played in bringing Sweden and Finland into NATO.

As he said repeatedly in our interview and has for months in hearings, however, funding the Pentagon through a continuing resolution or plussing up its budget in a reconciliation bill that includes an eventual “cliff” when the spending ends is insufficient.

“A base budget request that cuts defense spending in real terms doesn’t show Moscow we’re serious — let alone Beijing,” he said on the floor this week, with few colleagues watching and only a handful of reporters in the gallery. “Leading from behind would be bad enough, but this is just plain falling behind."

It may seem like so much Washington minutiae, particularly for the man who columnist George F. Will, a McConnell friend, calls “the most important Republican since Ronald Reagan.”

Yet as he enters the final months of a congressional career that began with Reagan’s second term, McConnell wants to remind his party of what a defense build-up can mean to rebuild the country’s industrial base and that it can also deliver a message to allies and adversaries alike.

It's not just the ’80s, though, that he’s eager for his party to recall. McConnell also wants Republicans to grasp the original meaning of America First and recall the Smoot-Hawley tariff, a period when America thought it could recede from the world.

“We don't expect every American to remember what happened in the '30s,” he said. “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.”