Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell fired insulting jabs at Tucker Carlson and former President Donald Trump during a press conference on Tuesday.
The Kentucky Republican took cheap shots at the former Fox News host as well as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee as he crowed over the Senate passage of a monumental foreign aid package.
After a months-long stalemate, the Senate passed the staggering $95 billion emergency foreign aid package late Tuesday, by a vote of 79 to 18 with only 15 Republicans voting against it. The package clears the way for over $61 billion for the war in Ukraine, an issue that saw GOP lawmakers deeply divided. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) praised McConnell’s efforts to get past the opposition while the Republican leader took a victory lap by blasting critics.
During the press conference, Fox News’s Chad Pergram remarked that McConnell is “one of the most ardent backers of Ukraine in the Senate” and asked him “what took so long” for other GOP lawmakers to get on board.
.@LeaderMcConnell: “I think the demonization of Ukraine began by @TuckerCarlson, who in my opinion ended up where he should have been all along, which is interviewing Vladimir Putin.” pic.twitter.com/brVaYt4Eek
— CSPAN (@cspan) April 23, 2024
“Well, that’s a good question. You already know the answer,” McConnell replied.
“I think the demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who, in my opinion, ended up where he should have been all along, which is interviewing Vladimir Putin,” McConnell smugly added, referring to Carlson’s ouster at Fox News and his subsequent interview with Putin on his own media network.
Senate easily passes aid bill for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. The bill now goes to the President for his signature. pic.twitter.com/ccWPx4wahR
— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) April 24, 2024
“And so he had an enormous audience which convinced a lot of rank-and-file Republicans that maybe this was a mistake,” McConnell claimed before taking a swipe at Trump who has made no secret of his thoughts about the 82-year-old senator.
“I think that the former president [Trump] had sort of mixed views on it. We all felt the border was a complete disaster, myself included. And Chad, you remember covering the phases we went through,” he told the congressional correspondent.
“First, it was an effort to make law, which requires you to deal with Democrats. And then a number of our members thought it wasn’t good enough. And then our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all,” he continued.
“That took months to work our way through it. So we ended up doing the supplemental that was originally proposed, which dealt with not all problems. It didn’t solve the border problem, but certainly addressed the growing threats at the moment,” he added.
Nays on foreign aid bill:
Barasso
Blackburn
Braun
Budd
Cruz
Hagerty
Hawley
Johnson
Lee
Lummis
Marshall
Merkley
Rubio
Sanders
Schmitt
Scott FL
Vance
Welch— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) April 24, 2024
