Donald Trump seems to struggle to give a consistent explanation of why he felt it necessary to invade Iran, and why the conflict didn’t end in the period of a few weeks that he promised it would.
As America gets ready to head to the polls for the midterms in a few weeks, Republican candidates are finding themselves having to explain why a supposedly anti-war America First president has taken them to war, and why they’re having to face higher prices for petrol, energy – and everything else in turn.
Trump, now on the campaign trail holding rallies in states that are usually so solidly Republican that the party doesn’t need to campaign there, has settled on one sort-of-explanation for why his war is ongoing.
The operation was a total triumph, he insists, but the US needs to stay there to make sure that Iran definitely can’t develop a nuclear weapon. It’s a “small price to pay for keeping the world safe,” he says, echoing the exact arguments of the neo-conservatives Trump beat so decisively in the Republican primary in 2016.
At his rally in Nebraska – a deep-red state that he won by more than 20 points in 2024 – on Monday night, though, Donald Trump went off script. After reeling off his explanation as to why the Iran war was necessary to protect America, he started to wonder out loud whether Iran should be allowed to attack the USA after all.
“They can take out a city,” Trump said, in the tone he reserves for comments he knows will be incendiary. “Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.”
Between them, the California counties that contain Los Angeles and San Diego contain around 13 million Americans – meaning that something approaching one in twenty people in the country Donald Trump leads live near those two cities alone.
It is characteristically short-sighted of Trump, too: the President likes states that vote for him, and dislikes those which don’t, forgetting that even the states he didn’t win contain millions of his voters. California contains more Trump 2024 voters than every state except Texas and Florida. Some of those who have seen Trump’s remarks must be feeling somewhat ambivalent about that vote today.
Of course, the serving president of the United States suggesting that an adversary with whom it is currently at war should be allowed to destroy two major cities – presumably killing millions of those people – ought to be the kind of outrage that ends a political career.
If a Democratic politician ever said anything even a tenth as ghastly, it would surely end them within days. Fox News would play it on a loop. Every Republican candidate would raise it every time they were in front of a camera. Even if they accepted it was a joke, and many of them would insist it wasn’t, they would say it was an outrage to say it at a time of war.
Because it was said by Donald Trump, of course, MAGA media and the Republican establishment will stay silent. Chillingly, the crowd behind Donald Trump in Nebraska cheered his remarks on.
That doesn’t mean that they will be without consequence. Donald Trump did not win two presidential elections with the votes of the MAGA faithful alone: he needed the backing of independents as well to get him over the line.
Republicans hoping to keep control of the House and the Senate in the midterms are absolutely reliant on those voters, who backed Trump in 2024 in the hope he would lower prices and improve the economy. Such voters were already wavering on Trump after he failed to deliver on either of those goals.
If they see the Commander-in-Chief casually joking about the destruction of US cities, at Iran’s hands, during wartime, that could be the final straw for many of them. What is already set to be a bad election season for Republicans could turn into a rout.
If it does, the lame duck president Trump could see his hold over his party disintegrate all at once, instead of ebb away slowly. Trump’s power of patronage from the White House is already time-limited. If Democrats control Congress, his ability to pass legislation or appoint his nominees is gone, too. If Trump is an election loser on top of that, he has almost no hold left over his party.
Republicans are cowed after years of Trump’s dominance over their party. Those with enough spine to stand up to the president were forced out years ago. But Trump is running out of time, running out of power, and is getting only more aggressive and extreme as he does so.
His party is unlikely to turn on him before the midterms, even for comments as outrageous as these. Voters, though, might feel differently. And if the vote goes badly enough, even the Republicans might turn on the president. The next month could get very interesting indeed.
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