The Hill talked with pro-war Republican Senators, who are worried over Donald Trump’s possible actions on Ukraine, the NATO alliance and the arming of Taiwan. According to The Hill on Aug. 1, they see “Trump’s invitation to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to visit him at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after the NATO summit in Washington as a worrisome development, given Orbán’s close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his efforts to undermine NATO’s support for the defense of Ukraine.” Secondarily, they see in Trump’s choice for running mate of Sen. J.D. Vance, “who led the opposition to the Ukrainian assistance,” confirming such worries. One such senator, who preferred to remain unidentified, said that Trump’s invite to Orbán is “concerning… I can’t tell you why he’s doing it.”
Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the longtime Republican leader in the Senate explained: “I support the ticket. I also support Ukraine, and I’m going to be arguing, no matter who gets elected President” for deterring Russian aggression. “It’s not just Ukraine, we’ve got worldwide organized authoritarian regimes talking to each other—China, North Korea, Russia, Iran and Iran’s proxies. This is a serious challenge. This is the single largest problem facing the democratic world, no matter who wins the election. And that’s what I’m going to be working on the next couple years.” Orbán is “the one member of NATO who’s essentially turned his country over to the Chinese and the Russians. [He’s] been looking for ways to undermine NATO’s efforts to defeat the Russians in Ukraine. So Viktor Orbán, I think, has now made Hungary the most recent problem in NATO.”
