Mitch McConnell announced last night that his plan to advance a combination of aid to Ukraine and border security has failed, due to the shocking discovery that Donald Trump, far from being the public-spirited citizen they apparently took him for, is a cynical, power-hungry demagogue and his allies are gutless sycophants.
You might wonder why this revelation struck him so late, and at a point where it has come at such immense cost. Let me explain the series of rather obvious miscalculations that led to this fiasco.
Basically every Democrat in Congress, along with many Republicans, wants to continue giving military aid to Ukraine so it can defend itself against Russia’s ongoing invasion. But because the issue splits the GOP, and Republicans control the House, passing this aid isn’t easy. House Speaker Mike Johnson can block Ukraine aid from coming to the floor, even though a majority in both chambers favors this aid.
When anti-Ukraine Republicans articulated their opposition to helping Ukraine, they usually framed it as having something to do with the American border. “Critics asked how Biden could justify rushing thousands of troops to assist Ukraine and defend the borders of NATO, yet stubbornly neglect the chaos at our border,” wrote the Heritage Foundation in 2022. “We should be protecting our border, not the border of Ukraine,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene.
In reality, not even Marjorie Taylor Greene is stupid enough to think there is a direct trade-off between helping Ukraine and reducing the surge of asylum claims in the United States. It is simply a rhetorical conceit to avoid admitting that anti-Ukraine Republicans either don’t care about or actively support Russia’s goal of crushing Ukraine, using a facile rhetorical conceit that both issues can be described with the word “border” to create a false choice.
Nonetheless, pro-Ukraine Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, decided to take these “arguments” at face value. Their clever-sounding plan was to hold up aid to Ukraine — aid they themselves support — unless Democrats agreed to secure the border.
The pro-Ukraine Republicans understood that the conceit that helping Ukraine came at the cost of American border security was nonsensical. But they decided to indulge it anyway, on the calculation that only securing the border would pacify anti-Ukraine Republicans. “Let’s be clear: This is a false choice. America is a superpower,” wrote Republican Russia hawk Marc Thiessen last fall, “We can secure our borders and also lead on the world stage. But Biden’s failure to do the former is feeding the forces of both nativism and isolationism on the right — giving them ammunition to argue against continued U.S. leadership in support of Ukraine.”
What was supposed to be the magic of the deal is that this border agreement would not be a traditional immigration compromise, in which Republicans get more enforcement in return for Democrats getting humane treatment for Dreamers or other immigrant groups. It would be a one-way deal, ratcheting up border security. Immigrant-rights groups would complain, but Democrats would have to go along in order to get Ukraine aid.
And the Democrats did go along, despite complaints from immigration activists, resulting in a moderately conservative border security deal that Democrats could just barely swallow. Instead, opposition came from conservatives.
It wasn’t just that the conservatives didn’t think the border security was good enough to justify passing Ukraine aid. They decided they didn’t want to pass a border-security deal at all.
The reason, of course, is that Trump is running on border chaos as one of his biggest campaign issues. If President Biden signs a bipartisan bill to restrict asylum claims, then Trump won’t have this issue. Trump has been urging Republicans in Congress to tank the bill so he can keep the issue alive.
A Senate Republican aid tells Politico’s Playbook, “It’s very clear that a large group of Republicans in the Senate and the House no longer want to do border security … Trump wouldn’t have his issue to run on. That’s what’s going on here: They don’t want to give up that issue.”
McConnell reacted to this adverse development by explaining to his caucus at a Wednesday-night meeting that the border deal he negotiated was actually good for conservatives. It had provisions Democrats would never accept without the lever of Ukraine aid. He even quoted Donald Trump saying in the past that Democrats would never vote for border enforcement.
See! It was a great deal for conservatives who are upset about border security! Even Trump’s own words proved it!
The wee flaw in this calculation, however, is that Trump doesn’t actually care about border security. Alleviating the border problem is much worse for Trump than doing nothing about it. Border security for Ukraine aid turned out to attach one thing Trump fans hated to another thing Trump fans hated.
For that matter, the Republicans who claim to oppose aiding Ukraine on account of border security didn’t actually mean what they said, either. When somebody provides a made-up excuse for their position, satisfying the made-up excuse will just cause them to make up a different excuse.
It was totally predictable that Trump would come out publicly against any deal that either made the immigration problem better or made Biden appear effective. Trump has been very clear all along that he wants conditions in the country to be as horrible as possible in every way when he is out of power. It was equally predictable that, when he did, most Republicans would go along with him.
The pro-Ukraine wing of the Republican party wasted months dithering on a doomed plan. Meanwhile Ukrainians are dying and desperately conserving ammunition, without being able to know when or even if they will receive more supplies.
So now that this doomed plan has wasted time and lives, pro-Ukraine Republicans face the choice that they were trying to weasel their way out of. They can split their party and jam through aid to Ukraine. Or they can let Russia win the war.
