President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House armed with a clear-cut mandate from a popular-vote majority to put the interests of the United States first. This places his coming administration on a direct collision course with Republicans in the US Senate who staunchly identify themselves with the “multilateral” worldview of a Western progressive political establishment that finds its current home in America within the Democratic Party.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) may not be the upper chamber party leader anymore, but he has handed the baton to a close ally, Sen. John Thune (R-SD), and he will still be a force to be reckoned with over the final two years of his current term. Upon announcing in February that he would step down as Senate GOP leader at the end of 2024, McConnell took pains to stress a core conviction that will drive him through 2026. “I believe more strongly than ever that America’s global leadership is essential to preserving the shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan discussed,” he asserted.
With a 53-47 Senate GOP majority, it only takes four McConnell-contingent Republicans to pass Democrat-backed “global leadership” legislation or thwart Trump-supported initiatives.
McConnell is showing all the signs of a man digging in for a fight as Trump Part II approaches. During an address at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, on December 7, the 82-year-old senator, who has been in his seat since 1985, took a not-so-subtle swipe at Trump’s America First agenda.
‘Force-Multiplying Institutions and Partnerships’
“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 asserted. “But let’s be absolutely clear: America will not be made great again by those who are content to manage our decline.”
Does that sound like a man looking forward to working with an incoming Republican president?
“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 continued. “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.”
In the ideological battle between national sovereignty and multi-national governance raging everywhere in the West today, the leading face of the Republican establishment on Capitol Hill makes no secret as to which side he is on.
While Democrats have been the main catalysts for the mammoth outpouring of US financial and military aid to Ukraine during the Biden years, how many Americans are aware that key Republican senators have publicly defined Russia as a hot enemy of the United States?
Senate Republicans Against Russian ‘Continued Aggression’
New GOP boss Thune is chief among those beating the war drums against Moscow. “America needs to provide leadership,” he said in a speech in Watertown, South Dakota, in March. “The world is a dangerous place. Right now, our choice with Ukraine is to send them weapons and let them fight their battles” or “send them American sons and daughters, which is what will happen if Russia succeeds in Ukraine and goes next against a NATO ally such as one of the Baltics – Estonia, Lithuania, or Latvia or Poland,” Thune declared. “Then our men and women are in that fight.”
“In Russia, President [Vladimir] Putin has embarked on a massive land war in Europe and has mobilized his society for continued aggression,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), one of the most zealous Republican advocates of aid for Ukraine on Capitol Hill, wrote this year in a personal treatise he titled “Peace Through Strength: A Generational Investment in the US Military.”
“With an economy fully mobilized for war, Russia will continue to exert itself against Ukraine and potentially against the eastern flank of NATO for years to come,” the senator proclaimed.
Wicker is in a choice position to resist any Trump efforts to turn off the US aid spigot to Ukraine, Mississippi Today reporter Bobby Harrison states. Wicker, who proclaimed Russia was America’s greatest threat in 2016, is beginning a new six-year term and will still be in the Senate after Trump leaves office, Harrison pointed out. In other words, he can’t be primaried by an angry GOP grassroots should he turn against Trump.
Greasing the ‘Defense Industrial Base’
But perhaps it is McConnell who gives away what the seemingly unavoidable GOP Senate-Trump foreign policy clash will really be about: keeping the cash flowing to the military contractor powerhouses that wield such enormous influence in Washington, DC.
“And $15.4 billion will be spent … here in America … on weapons for Ukraine to continue degrading the military strength of a major US adversary,” McConnell said in February during a speech on the Senate floor, defending the National Security Supplemental bill that was passed that month, much to the joy of a grateful President Joe Biden.
Note how McConnell freely admits that Ukraine is indeed a US proxy for war against Russia. Now, here comes the crucial point.
“Overall, even accounting for direct assistance sent to allies like Israel, more than 75% of this legislation is bound for investments right here in America,” McConnell crowed. “And more than 60% of it goes to the defense industrial base, where increasing capacity is a direct investment in long-term strength abroad and prosperity at home.”
That’s certainly a twist on Donald Trump’s America First vision of defending US blue-collar jobs. McConnell is talking about one industry only, a line of business that is dependent on American taxpayer money like a heroin junkie to a needle. And make no mistake, any attempts to cut off the addict from his dealer will be bitterly opposed. This is what Trump and his proposed Department of Government Efficiency will be up against in a Republican-controlled Senate in 2025.
