U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., November 25, 2025. REUTERS Nathan Howard
President Donald Trump was just harshly criticized by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has served the president faithfully as his Senate Majority Leader.
“McConnell bringing the heat after Blanche meeting with Senate GOP today,” Burgess Everett, Semafor congressional bureau chief, reported Thursday on X, citing McConnell saying: “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong – Take your pick."
This is not McConnell’s first open departure with the president he previously assisted in major policy matters, from avoiding conviction during his impeachment to appointing pro-Trump judges throughout the judiciary.
Last month, McConnell wrote an op-ed for Fox News that scathingly criticized Trump and others in the GOP for their admiration of outgoing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's
"[For] the better part of a decade, Hungarian politics has persisted as an object of intense fascination in certain corners of the American right," McConnell observed. "This phenomenon is endlessly puzzling. America’s self-proclaimed national conservatives spoke of Orbán's’s Hungary as an oasis of traditionalism amid the wasteland of an ailing, liberal and decadent postmodern Europe. And some American politicians appear to have bought into the myth."
He added, "To be clear, it is a myth. Orbán's’s champions on this side of the Atlantic may well consider his illiberal court-packing, crony capitalism or restriction of free speech an acceptable price for their desired social utopia. Yet for all the talk of reviving faith and family through statist intervention, Hungary’s religious participation and birth rates under his rule have declined right alongside the rest of the West." He claimed that Orbán's administration was based less on competence than on the "fawning servitude to authoritarians," which McConnell argued runs "counter to American values."
He concluded, "Watching this from Kentucky, it is hard to understand how some on the American right thought that staking U.S. influence on the outcome of a parliamentary election in a small, central European country was putting America’s interests first. To the extent that what happens in Hungary matters to America, it is a question of whether its actions on the world stage — not its social policies — align with America’s strategic interests."
Because of McConnell’s criticisms of Trump, the Republicans running to replace him as he prepares to retire have all distanced themselves from their former doyen. All three of the candidates criticized McConnell for his open breaches with Trump, even though two of the candidates had direct ties to McConnell in terms of their own careers.
