Donald Trump Jr.: Iran War Caused GOP Election Disaster
Another top supporter of President Donald Trump has confessed that the war in Iran, which Trump started at the behest of Israel and under pressure from neoconservative warmongers, cost the GOP control of Capitol Hill.
That supporter: Donald Trump, Jr.
Echoing Vice President JD Vance and President Trump himself, Trump fils said the war “shifted voter sentiment” for millions of independents and disgruntled Democrats who voted for Trump in 2020.
The chicken-hawk neocons, of course, deny any such thing. They mulishly claim that not “finishing off” Iran led to the cataclysmic defeat of the GOP.
Vance and POTUS
Vance sent the neocons into a conniption when he posted his sentiments on X after a White House meeting that was supposed to coordinate messaging about the loss.
“One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch,” Vance wrote a day after the crypto-communist tsunami:
I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster — one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points.… In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. …
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.…
[E]veryone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
President Trump agreed, and as he said months ago about gas prices, he would launch the war again.
“Well, I think it’s largely true, because it drove the gasoline up a little bit short-term. And probably it’s true. But at the same time, if I had to do it again, I’d have to do it again, because long-term it’s the only answer. You can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday.
He said the same thing in August, and topped it off by saying he would “never apologize” for prices at the filling station.
“So for you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember you’re doing it so that a very evil country — a country, really, it’s the number one state sponsor of terror in the world — we don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said:
So remember that when you have to pay a little bit more, you’re at $4. It’s okay. I mean, I’ll never apologize. I did the right thing. … [Y]ou just have to remember that what we’re doing is a great service for the world. Not only for ourselves, for the world. And we’re really doing a great job. Our military is unbelievable. The blockade is unstoppable. It’s a wall of steel. The blockade is a wall of steel.
In May, he was unequivocal. A reporter asked how much Americans’ financial predicament was motivating him to make a deal with Iran.
“Not even a little bit,” Trump replied:
The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran — they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing — we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.
Don Jr., Neocon Denial
Now comes Trump Jr. to say Vance and his father are right. Why, he asked on his podcast, did so many Trump supporters turn to the Democrats?
Because “the Trump coalition is made up of millions of disaffected Democrats, right? They’re former Democrats, people who never voted before or voted pretty reliably Democrat that felt left behind,” he said. But they are not simply loyal to either party, and instead are people who “think for themselves.”
Despite the administration’s successes on poverty, immigration, and violent crime, “there are ultimately downstream effects of things like the Iran war that push voters in a different direction,” he continued:
Perhaps they felt them a little bit more than they did safety. Totally understandable. And according to a chart going around on X the approval number graph was basically identical to the price of gas. … I’ve seen a few talking heads guys like … Marc Thiessen out there, trying to claim that the Iran war had nothing to do with Republicans losing, right? There’s no downside to the Iran war. Disgusting, actually. And … whether you think it was the right decision or not, the Iran war is largely what shifted voter sentiment and caused this wave. … It jacked up the price of gas. That’s the thing that people feel most immediately in their pockets. And it changed their minds. We also campaigned on not getting into these things. …. But it was definitely something after Afghanistan and Iraq.
Neocons insist that peace talks that prolonged the war caused the loss.
Example: former spokesman for President George W. Bush, Air Fleischer. He’s another neocon who never served in the military to fight the wars he advocates.
“The problem was not the Iran War. It was the cease fire,” he wrote to Vance on X:
If you start a war, you need to win it and finish it – otherwise don’t start it.
This war should have been over six months ago, with the Strait of Hormuz wide open and oil flowing. The second and third tiers of Iranian leadership should have been destroyed, and we should have supported the pro-western forces who could have taken leadership. We stood on the brink of a new, more peaceful Middle East – and then we blinked. We had a chance not only to deny Iran nuclear weapons, but to get rid of the world’s biggest supporter of terrorism.
Instead, we had a cease fire, which was followed by months of will we or won’t we finish the job. Every day was a different message. There still is. Is the war over? Is it about to begin? No one knows. There is confusion and inconsistency.
As Bush’s mouthpiece, Fleischer played a key role in pushing the falsehood that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein was linked to the al-Qaeda terrorists who perpetrated 9/11.
The Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen says likewise, as does Fox News’ Mark Levin. But Thiessen now adds that Trump’s tariff policy is also responsible.
“‘Iran cost us the election’ is a myth,” he wrote yesterday on X:
It was one part of a much bigger story. The Vanceguard/woke right is blaming the Iran war because they hate it, but ignoring the role tariffs played because they love them. Whatever you think of Iran or tariffs as a matter of policy, it’s intentionally dishonest.
X users replied with Thiessen’s ridiculous claim that “there is no downside” to attacking Iran.
