Mitch McConnell receives a standing ovation after his speech with an indirect swipe at Trump

Mitch McConnell received a standing ovation after delivering a speech that was an indirect swipe at President-elect Donald Trump.

The outgoing Republican Senate leader lamented the current state of the party compared to when Ronald Reagan was in power and warned Republicans against isolationism.

“Within the party that Ronald Reagan once led so ably, it is becoming increasingly fashionable to argue that the kind of global leadership he modeled is no longer America’s place,” McConnell said at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum at Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, on Saturday.

In a nod to Trump’s campaign slogan, McConnell added: “But let us be clear: America will not be made great again by those who are content to manage our decline.”

McConnell did not directly refer to the president-elect, but pointed to the growing threats from Russia and China and that “influential voices” risk forgetting the lessons of the Cold War. Politically reported.

The Kentucky senator, who received the Peace Through Strength award, stressed that America must stand “with friends in need.” “Whether they are resisting neo-Soviet imperialism in Ukraine, the Iranian-backed terrorist massacre in Israel, or the People’s Republic of China’s hegemony in the Indo-Pacific,” he said.

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And he warned of a “dangerous fiction” taking over the politics of both parties. “There is a dangerous fiction at both ends of our politics – that America’s primacy and the fruits of our leadership are self-sustaining,” McConnell said.

“Although allies in NATO and the Indo-Pacific are renewing their own commitment to hard power, interoperability and collective defense, some are now questioning America’s own role at the center of these force-multiplying institutions and partnerships.”

The president-elect takes an isolationist approach to foreign conflicts and believes the U.S. should not get involved unless it has a direct interest in doing so.

McConnell, who has long been critical of Trump, previously said the MAGA movement was “totally wrong” and that Trump had done “great damage” to the Republican Party, according to a book published before the presidential election.

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McConnell delivered a scathing assessment of how Trump has changed the Republican Party to the point where Reagan would “no longer recognize the party today,” the author said.

The revelations appeared in McConnell’s biography by Michael Tackett entitled The price of power. The senator gave Tackett personal recordings of his oral histories spanning nearly three decades.

“I think Trump was the biggest factor in changing the Republican Party from what Ronald Reagan saw, and he wouldn’t recognize it today,” McConnell told Tackett, according to an excerpt from the book.

He added that Trump “has done great damage to our party’s image and our competitiveness.”

Despite years of arguments between Trump and McConnell and his scathing criticism of Trump in the book, the Republican senator publicly endorsed him as the Republican presidential candidate in March.