After Zelensky Trashed Trump in PA, McConnell Rewarded Him With Photo-Op

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., gave Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky a photo-op at the nation’s Capitol on Wednesday, just days after the foreign leader used U.S. military assets to campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania.

The day before his trip to Pennsylvania, where Zelensky met with prominent Harris surrogates in a critical swing state, The New Yorker published an interview with the Ukrainian head-of-state in which he trashed both former President Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, the Republican nominees for president and vice president.

“What absolutely infuriates me is that you have policymakers from both parties enabling this and normalizing this type of behavior. It is absolutely inappropriate to enable a foreign leader, in the middle of a hotly contested election, to come the United States and effectively campaign against one of the major party candidates,” Dan Caldwell, public policy advisor at Defense Priorities, told The Federalist in an interview.

“I don’t blame Zelensky for trying to manipulate our politics. I don’t think it’s right, I don’t think that the United States should be continuing to almost unconditionally support Zelensky, but at the same time, the United States is the biggest single funder of the war in Ukraine, and so I don’t blame him for trying to achieve a political outcome that in his mind will benefit his country.”

While there was backlash from some Republicans — which included the House Oversight Committee opening investigations into the Biden administration’s use of military assets for apparent campaign activities and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., calling for the removal of Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States — McConnell decided to meet with Zelensky alongside House Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Johnson noted in his call for the ambassador’s resignation that “the facility was in a politically contested battleground state, was led by a top political surrogate for Kamala Harris, and failed to include a single Republican because — on purpose — no Republicans were invited.”

“The tour was clearly a partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats and is clearly election interference,” he added.

Republicans on Capitol Hill have succumbed to giving away billions of dollars to the Eastern European country, at least $1 billion of which U.S. officials failed to trace. Zelensky visited legislators this week after attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York City to ask for more F-16 fighter jets and long-range missiles, promising to bring Russia to the negotiating table and saying it will save the United States from having to shovel more cash into the war in the future.

On Wednesday, some Senate Republicans vying to replace McConnell as leader criticized Zelensky’s Pennsylvania campaign stop, with Minority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., telling the foreign leader to “stay out of American politics,” and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, calling it a “monumental blunder for Zelensky to get involved in American politics.” However, after meeting with Zelensky on Thursday, Cornyn, a top advisor to McConnell, doubled down on support for funding the Ukraine war.

“The message is that the longer that we slow-walk the weapons and put restrictions on their ability to use them against Russian stockpiles, energy resources and the like, the longer this war will go on,” Cornyn continued. “If we were to give them the authorities to use the weapons the way they want and deliver them on a timely basis, I think President Zelensky believes this war has a better chance of being resolved at the negotiating table.” 

The cognitive dissonance among Republicans, with some skeptical of Ukraine funding and others fully embracing the foreign war, is a window into a bygone era, where some Republicans are trapped in a Cold War mindset, Caldwell explained.

“It’s representative of the larger divide within the conservative movement on foreign policy. There are still far too many Republicans who think it is 1983 and think that Russia is still the Soviet Union, and that therefore anybody who is fighting Russia is somebody that we need to effectively support unconditionally,” he said. “Their brains are stuck in an era that has long passed us by, and I think that is driving a lot of the behavior you are seeing from some Republicans who still want to hold up Zelensky as the savior of Western democracy.”

“This is a guy who’s become more authoritarian, he’s effectively ruling through martial law, he’s outlawed political parties, shut down certain media outlets,” Caldwell added. “They’re engaging in mass conscription, literally grabbing young men off the streets and sending them to the front to fight. Just like any society that is in war for [an] extended period of time, Ukraine is becoming more illiberal.”

McConnell’s office did not respond to a request for comment from The Federalist.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.