McConnell Lumps in Trump’s GOP With Left While Bashing Isolationism, ‘Dangerous’ Belief Global Leadership ‘No Longer America’s Place’

Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell took a swipe at policies supported by President-elected Donald Trump and other factions of his party on Saturday at a speech in Southern California.

McConnell, who is stepping down from his leadership position next month, called on younger Republicans to enact Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” mantra while speaking at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley.

In one comment that appeared aimed at Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan.

“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,” he said. “But let’s be absolutely clear: America will not be made great again by those who are content to manage our decline.”

Elsewhere in his remarks, McConnell took on political elements on both sides of the aisle and notably mentioned NATO – which Trump has targeted in comments for years while calling on the country’s military to stop shouldering the costs of peace. McConnell said:

At both ends of our politics, a dangerous fiction is taking hold that America’s primacy and the fruits of our leadership are actually self-sustaining. Even his allies across NATO in the Indo-Pacific renew their own commitments to hard power, interoperability, and collective defense; some now question America’s own role at the center of these force-multiplying institutions and partnerships.

As Politico noted over the summer, Trump has spent years challenging the country’s commitment to NATO:

Donald Trump has threatened to leave NATO so many times — or has appeared to, anyway — that for many of his critics, it’s a question of when, not whether, he’d ditch the 75-year-old alliance if he’s reelected president in November.

In truth, Trump would be unlikely to quit NATO outright, according to interviews with former Trump national security officials and defense experts who are likely to serve in a second Trump term. But even if he doesn’t formally leave the organization, that doesn’t mean NATO would survive a second Trump term intact.

Trump met with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte two weeks after the election last month. Since his election, Trump has spoken little of NATO, other than to rule out an invitation for Ukraine.

Watch above via C-SPAN.