Outgoing Sen. Mitch McConnell Puts a Price on Trump's Lame-Duck Agenda: Break With Putin First

Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican who ran the Senate GOP for 18 years and is leaving Congress in January, just put a price tag on President Trump's year-end agenda. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Sunday, he wrote that "ending the obeisance to Mr. Putin may be table stakes for the end-of-year legislation. The president should plan accordingly."

Translation: get tougher on Russia's Vladimir Putin, or don't count on the votes after the Nov. 3 midterms. It's a rare public threat from a Republican senator against Trump's plans for the lame-duck session, the stretch between Election Day and the new Congress when outgoing members still vote.

What McConnell wrote

The op-ed, headlined "Coddling Putin Won't Bring Peace to Ukraine," says Trump's push to end the war "by pressuring the victim is certain to fail." He calls the president's approach "factually wrong, strategically naive and morally bankrupt," and takes a shot at "naive businessmen who seem to think diplomacy entails fawning over adversaries." That's aimed at Trump's negotiators.

He goes after the Pentagon too, saying not one senior policy official has visited Ukraine "and it shows," and accuses the administration of using the program that lets allies buy American weapons for Ukraine to make them "reimburse the U.S. for security assistance Congress already appropriated."

Then comes the leverage. "Senate Republicans oppose retreat and appeasement," he wrote. "They support Ukraine. They support NATO." Passing Trump's year-end bills, including a one-time defense spending boost, "will require working with Republicans who know the difference between the good guys and the bad guys."

The part he left out

McConnell compares Trump to Joe Biden, who paused $100 million in weapons for Ukraine in 2021 ahead of a summit with Putin. "We know what happened the following year," he wrote. He's right about that. Russia invaded under Biden in 2022, and it took Crimea under Barack Obama in 2014. In the four years of Trump's first term, Russia took no new Ukrainian ground. If history is the test, McConnell picked the wrong president to lecture.

He also skips what Trump's approach has produced in the last three weeks. Russia freed Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old retired Michigan teacher held since 2022, with no prisoner swap. The Kremlin now says it's ready to restart Russia-U.S.-Ukraine talks after Nov. 4, and a three-way meeting with China's Xi Jinping is being prepared for next month's summit in Shenzhen, where Trump wants nuclear weapons on the table.

And the "sanctions relief" McConnell blasts isn't what it sounds like. Trump used the waiver Congress itself wrote into the new Russia sanctions law to put it on hold for 60 days, and his order says every existing sanction on Russia stays in place. "I can sign it later, or any time that I want!" he wrote. The diesel deal was about pump prices: diesel was over $6 a gallon this month, and farmers and truckers were paying it. We laid out the full paper trail here.

A senator with nothing left to lose

McConnell announced on his 83rd birthday, Feb. 20, 2025, that his current term would be his last. He is 84 now, and his final day in office is Jan. 3, 2027. That makes the lame duck his last real lever, and he's pulling it.

It isn't the first time. In early 2025 he voted against three of Trump's Cabinet picks: Pete Hegseth at Defense, Tulsi Gabbard as intelligence chief and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services. He was the only Republican to vote no on Gabbard and Kennedy. On Hegseth, his no forced Vice President JD Vance to break a tie. All three were confirmed anyway.

Think of a departing manager who threatens to hold up the company's budget on his way out the door unless the boss runs things his way. He won't be around to live with what happens next. Everyone else will.

What happens next

McConnell's op-ed doesn't name a single other Republican senator who'd hold out with him, and we found no White House response to it by Monday morning. Watch three dates: Nov. 4, when Moscow says talks can resume; Nov. 18-19 in Shenzhen; and mid-December, when the 60-day sanctions review runs out, right as Congress tries to wrap up the year's spending. That's when we'll find out whether McConnell's threat has any votes behind it.