WH Memo: We’re Watching Conservatives Who Go Off Message
More than 3,000 conservative organizations have received a memorandum from the White House Office of Public Liaison that says they had better watch what they say about Tuesday’s crushing midterm election defeat for Republicans.
Because Big Brother Trump, The Wall Street Journal reported, is watching them.
The reason: Conservatives with brains are saying that Trump’s war on Iran on behalf of Israel led to the shellacking and the Democratic takeover of Capitol Hill.
The Memorandum
The concern at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is understandable. The coalition Trump built to retake the White House in 2024 “was beginning to splinter” because of Trump’s policies, the Journal reported.
“The White House Office of Public Liaison, which works with outside groups, sent a memo to more than 3,000 conservative organizations that laid out a list of Trump’s accomplishments in office and pledged to prevent newly ascendant Democrats from reversing them,” the newspaper continued:
The memo concluded with a sentence that was highlighted in yellow.
“As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations,” the memo said. Leaders of two prominent conservative organizations confirmed that they had received the memo.
The memo came after Republican leaders and well-known conservatives publicly blamed Trump’s policies for the election outcome. A White House official said the memo was meant to keep the conservative coalition unified during the final two years of Trump’s presidency.
The memo was not a threat, a spokesman told the Journal, but only “part of a larger effort to mobilize outside supporters.” And anyway, the spokesman said, the office had sent similar messages before.
Perhaps, but the newspaper scrutinized other such messages and found they didn’t include a warning that the office was “monitoring the group’s statements,” the Journal explained:
“As always, please continue to flag any statements of support, press releases, op-eds and media engagements on the topics outlined above,” reads an Oct. 1 email to conservative groups.
After Republicans lost the House and Senate, several conservatives made pointed statements about the scale of the GOP defeat.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who unsuccessfully challenged Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, laid the blame for the losses squarely on Trump’s shoulders.
“This midterm, no question, was a rebuke of the president and the Congress by Democrats, independents and some Republicans that crossed over,” he told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz described the losses as “a Watergate-level repudiation” in a social-media post, writing Trump’s “tariffs have made everything too expensive” while “the Iran war has dragged on too long.”
Cruz, of course, favored the war and pushed Trump to attack Iran because the regime, he falsely claimed, could easily be toppled.
In that long X post on November 4, Cruz also blamed the cost of living for the repudiation of Republicans. And while he admitted the war “has dragged on too long,” Cruz didn’t think of that before giving Trump the bad advice to start the war. He confidently said the United States could easily defeat Iran, as did other chickenhawk neocons such as Ben Shapiro. He said the war would last only “days or weeks,” while he and podcaster Mark Levin claimed the war would not affect the midterm elections.
Conservatives Rebel
The Journal noted that “some conservative groups were quick to blame the losses on what they saw as Republicans abandoning longstanding conservative principles,” citing a memo from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser:
Republican consultants got the campaign they wanted, and the defeat they earned. You cannot spend years telling your base to sit down and shut up, then act surprised when they don’t stand up for you on Election Day.
Another group blamed tariffs, as did Cruz, and Senator John Curtis (R-Utah) explained where Trump failed on X.
“After the Biden era, Americans wanted an economy that worked for them,” Curtis wrote as elections return came in:
Instead, they received a hastily executed war, headline after headline of scandals, a ballooning $40 trillion debt, and unpredictable tariffs.
Others, such as podcaster Matt Walsh, frankly blamed the war and “feckless” Republicans on Capitol Hill. “The Iran War is the greatest political blunder in the last two decades at least,” he wrote on election night:
A catastrophically stupid decision. An unforgivable betrayal of America First principles.
“The Republican congress did nothing. Achieved nothing,” he wrote hours later:
Took the mandate they were given and did precisely zero with it. Feckless losers who are relieved to no longer be in the majority. The only thing Republicans do with power is bide their time until they can relinquish it.
Walsh replied this way to those who point to his “controversial argument about America’s priorities, saying he’d rather Iran have a nuclear weapon than see the United States run by communists”:
Anti-American communists running America are a far greater threat to me and my family and all Americans than Iran could ever be. They will do far more damage to the American people than Iran has ever done. Trying to defeat Iran at the expense of handing our country over to freaks who hate western civilization is the worst trade imaginable.
Walsh also went after Trump for an X post attacking the voters who put Democrats in charge of Congress.
“Trump has been talking down to the American people for his entire second term, something he never did in the first,” Walsh wrote:
It started with the Epstein debacle. Now that he’s losing and unpopular, he’s going to point the finger at his own citizens with no concern for what his meltdown will do to the future of the conservative movement or the Republican Party. It’s going to get worse and uglier. The worst thing conservatives can do now is feel any obligation at all to defend this bullshit. It’s indefensible and we all know it.
Sean Davis of The Federalist has been clear as well: The neoconservatives’ Iran war killed the GOP, and now they deny the war played any role in the debacle.
“Neocons swore to Trump that their war in Iran would be popular and that he would be rewarded at the polls in November,” he wrote:
Everyone with a brain who has watched every other war they demanded go sideways always knew that was nonsense, but they persisted.
They are losing their minds right now because the mid-term election results exposed them. They are losing their minds because now Trump knows they fed him a load of crap.
Today, Davis also recalled the aftermath of the Iraq War: “Failed Middle East interventionism gave us Barack Obama. The Iran war gave us a blue Texas. Let’s hope that’s the full extent of the damage.”
Vice President JD Vance, Donald Trump, Jr. and even Trump himself have said that the war lost the election for Republicans.
The Journal did not report whether the White House Office of Public Liaison is watching them as well.
