Mississippi’s senior member of the U.S. Senate, Roger F. Wicker, is among the few Republicans who could put a crimp in President Trump’s comfy relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
The Pontotoc native was a state senator and later congressman for the state’s first district from 1995-2007, when Gov. Haley Barbour appointed him to succeed the retiring Trent Lott in the U.S. Senate.
Wicker has risen in the second Trump administration to the prestigious chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee, placing him in the breach between the American president and the Russian dictator.
On Feb. 18, Wicker declared that Putin “is a war criminal who should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed.” Frankly, I was proud of Wicker for his indictment of Putin.
Wicker said an end to the war should not be negotiated without Ukraine’s presence.
In January, Wicker tried to spin Trump’s Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth’s lack of relevant experience into a plus for the job.
“We must not underestimate the importance of having a top-shelf communicator as secretary of defense,” he said. “Other than the president, no official plays a larger role in telling the men and women in uniform, the Congress and the public about the threats we face and the need for a peace-through-strength defense policy.”
A month later, Wicker called out Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” when the defense secretary said the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in NATO.
National columnist Heather C. Richardson wrote, “Wicker said he was ‘puzzled’ and ‘disturbed’ by Hegseth’s comments and added: ‘I don’t know who wrote the speech — it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.’ ”
Wicker’s brand new role as chair of perhaps the most important committee in Congress places the 73-year-old Air Force veteran and reservist under a limelight that’s never illuminated him to this degree.
Two recent examples:
• “Mississippi Today” editor Adam Ganucheau’s March 6 column entitled, “Trump is upending the world order. Will Sen. Roger Wicker stand up to him?”
“What will it take for Wicker, one of America’s most powerful leaders on the international stage, who took an oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,’ to stand up to the president on behalf of his country and the world?” Ganucheau wrote.
Wicker, he added, “holds more power than just about anyone else in the world to call out Trump and other Putin sympathizers who are trying to dismantle the world order.
“All Wicker’s constituents have, however, is hope alone — hope that our senior senator and one of America’s most powerful leaders does something more than hope before it’s too late,” Ganucheau opined.
• Longtime Republican strategist and Mississippi native Stuart Stevens’ Jan. 20 essay on his longtime friend and client, Wicker, in The New Republic:
“Why (didn’t) Wicker use the power of his position as chairman of the Armed Services Committee to insist that Trump nominate a serious person with the experience and gravitas to lead the most powerful military in the history of the world? … What is he afraid of? That he might be primaried in a race held at the end of the decade? What compels a man at the peak of a career to violate fundamental principles voiced over three decades?” asked Jackson native Stevens, a consultant for The Lincoln Project, a pro-democracy group.
Those are the type of questions that Wicker will face about the man leading this nation’s military as long as questions about Ukraine persist, and as long as he retains his important role in the so-called “world’s most exclusive club,” the United States Senate.
Mac Gordon, a native of McComb, is a retired newspaperman. He can be reached at macmarygordon@gmail.com.
