The growing discontent among Republican national security hawks was most evident on Tuesday when Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader and perhaps Mr. Trump’s most important partner in Congress, effectively rebuked the president by introducing a measure denouncing “a precipitous withdrawal” of American troops from Syria and Afghanistan.
The senator’s repudiation came on the same day that Mr. Trump’s own intelligence chiefs, led by Dan Coats, a former Republican senator, gave Congress a radically different assessment of international threats facing the United States from the president’s own. They warned about fresh Russian efforts to interfere in American elections, predicted that North Korea would never agree to give up its nuclear weapons and made clear that the Islamic State is still plotting attacks around the world. They made no mention of Mr. Trump’s top security priority of building a wall along the southwestern border…
“Perhaps as we now pivot to the presidential elections, the Republicans may finally be thinking, well, maybe we ought to recalibrate a little here and understand there are real risks and we have to provide a check and balance on the commander in chief in whatever ways we can,” said Wendy Sherman, an under secretary of state in the Obama administration.
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