Analysis: McConnell touts win over ‘MAGA king’ as primaries deepen GOP rift

[cigaretteman]

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been playing defense within his party for the past few years as he attempts to gently distance himself from Donald Trump.
Nowhere has been this more evident than in this year’s primary season, specifically in races where Trump’s chosen Senate candidates have prioritized their loyalty to the president rather than the Senate GOP leader.
Thus, it makes sense for McConnell to be on a bit of a victory tour lately, touting the overwhelming bipartisan vote in Congress to approve $40 billion in Ukraine aid and feeling buoyed by what he views as a victory over the MAGA king, writes Dave Clarke in Monday’s Daily 202.
McConnell’s message? The isolationists aligned with Trump lost, and the old Republican guard on foreign policy that he counts himself a part of won.
Per Dave:

He hasn’t been shy about taking credit for the relative ease with which the bill made it through the Senate despite Trump’s opposition. In interviews, McConnell pointed to his trip to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as consequential. And did you know he spoke to President Biden ahead of the vote to convince him to drop the idea of tying pandemic funds to the Ukraine money? Well, he made sure the reporters he talked to did.
“I am interested in diminishing the number of my members who believe that America somehow can exist alone in the world,” McConnell told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published Friday.
But was the vote a resurgence within his party of the foreign policy worldview he prefers or something like its last gasp?
McConnell, in his glee, ignores this: His role was made much easier by being the minority, not the majority, leader.

Read more on McConnell’s intraparty struggle here.