Republican Pennsylvania Senate hopeful meets with IDF leaders in Israel

Republican Pennsylvania Senate hopeful David McCormick reportedly met with military leaders of the Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday during a planned trip to the Middle Eastern country.

McCormick was accompanied by his wife, Dina Powell, who served as the deputy national security adviser during the Trump administration and is also expected to meet with the family of hostages and other Israeli leaders, according to Axios reporter Barak Ravid.

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“Republican Pennsylvania Senatorial candidate Dave McCormick is in Israel,” Ravid posted to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday. “Today he met w/ IDF officials at Kfar Azza. He will meet military leaders, government officials & hostage families. Source says he is there to show his solidarity & understand situation from the ground.”

The Republican’s visit comes as Israel is months into a war with the terrorist organization Hamas, which attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

McCormick, who previously ran for the Senate in 2022 but lost the Republican primary to celebrity Dr. Mehmet Oz, is currently expected to be the Republican nominee in 2024 and is hoping to beat Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) in November.

The Republican hopeful has criticized Casey, along with President Joe Biden, as “weakening the United States’s position on the global stage,” citing record-high immigration numbers at the U.S. southern border with Mexico. He also criticized the president’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in an end-of-year op-ed for the Delaware Valley Journal last month, along with the United States’s response to wars in Ukraine and Israel.

“Their every move has weakened our position on the world stage, undermining deterrence, and showing our adversaries that the United States may not be the superpower it once was,” McCormick wrote in the op-ed. “Biden’s failures have had the support every step of the way of rubber stamp Senator Bob Casey. Pennsylvania’s senior senator votes for the president’s disastrous agenda 98 percent of the time and repeatedly has failed to use his position of power when it matters most.”

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McCormick continued, “Pennsylvanians deserve better than weak, ineffective leaders who have proven themselves to be incapable of keeping America and our friends safe.”

The Pennsylvanian announced his bid to unseat Casey in September. Casey has been in the Senate since 2007 and is one of a handful of Democrats in the Senate that the party is hoping will beat their opponents in order to keep control of the upper chamber.