Trump on “60 Minutes”: War, Gas Prices, Dislike of Israel Caused GOP Defeat; Ready to “Work a Deal” to Keep Illegals in Country

President Donald Trump has again confessed that the war in Iran and high gas prices are responsible for the GOP’s election debacle on November 3.

Speaking to Ross Douthat on CBS’s 60 Minutes, however, Trump added a third reason: “dislike” for Israel.

Trump also might have surprised long-time MAGA supporters by claiming his immigration policy was “too tough,” and saying he’s ready to work with Democrats to ink amnesty for illegal aliens.

Thus has Trump announced that he will break another campaign promise, stop mass deportations, and keep illegals in the country to become Democratic voters.

War Cost GOP the Midterms

After Vice President JD Vance admitted that the war in Iran lost the election for Republicans, President Trump agreed, as did his son, Donald Trump, Jr.

A pollster “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,” Vance wrote on X:

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.

Trump, Jr. followed suit on his Rumble Podcast. “The Iran war is largely what shifted voter sentiment and caused this wave. … It jacked up the price of gas,” he said:

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.

President Trump agreed with Vance, but said he would start the war again to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

“[I]f 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,” he told reporters at the White House on November 4.

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.

Speaking to Douthat, Trump admitted again that his war on behalf of Israel handed Democrats control of Capitol Hill.

“I was not on the ballot, but I campaigned hard for some people,” Trump said:

And I think if I was on the ballot, it would have been a much different situation because you saw the level of popularity and love. There was love. We had massive rallies. Nobody’s ever seen rallies like that for midterms. And there wasn’t one room that didn’t have thousands of people outside [that] couldn’t get in. So you had to transfer those voters, however, to candidates that they didn’t like. But there’s something beyond that.

They didn’t like the war. They didn’t like the fact that gasoline went up. Because I had it down at a low in Iowa — it was $1.85 … a gallon, $1.85 a gallon. And when you look at $1.85 and you go up to three-and-a-half, $4, that’s still lower than Biden, lower than Obama. But the war was blamed for that, and they didn’t like the war, I think, mostly for that reason. Because I think everyone agrees that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, and they will never have a nuclear weapon. They won’t have that.

“Dislike for Israel”

But Trump added that another reason for the GOP’s loss was a “great dislike, incredibly, for Israel.”

“There seems to be a dislike for Israel,” he continued:

So you have that, you have the war itself, you have the gas prices, and I think those are the primary reasons. 

Trump said he told Vance to write what he thought about the election. And that shellacking at the ballot box regardless, Trump said if he had it to do over again, he would attack because Iran cannot be permitted to build a nuclear weapon. “I have to go with what’s right for our country,” Trump said.

Neocon warmongers who assured Trump the war was a good idea, and insist it was not the reason for the Republican defeat, must be fuming.

Washington Post columnist Marc “Thiessen is probably screaming into the void right now,” analyst Ryan Girdusky wrote on X. Thiessen has spent the last week in denial.

“Most courageous decision of any president in my lifetime,” Thiessen wrote today over video of Trump’s claiming he had to go to war.

Immigration

Thiessen and other valiant computer warriors aside, Trump told Douthat that he’d “love” to deal with Democrats on immigration to permit millions of illegals to stay in the country.

Douthat asked whether immigration hurt the president and GOP last week. Trump said he gets an “A-plus” on border security for ending the Biden invasion at the border and deporting dangerous criminals.

“But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs that created one violation or breaking of the law — and that was that they came into the country illegally,” Trump said:

Now, there is a large part of the country that think that they should be put out, and there’s a large part of the country that think that they should be allowed to stay if they’re good people working in a landscaping company, or working in a hotel or doing something, right? And in some cases paying taxes, and there’s a large group of people that think that they should be allowed to stay.

Douthat: So you think your deportation policy went too far. …

Trump: I think it might be too tough. Yeah. 

Douthat: What would happen? What does the deal look like with the Democrats?

Trump: I think ultimately that hurt me. … Well, the deal would be, we would work something out. And I think that’s something that’s actually doable. …

When Douthat asked if “legal status” for working immigrants is “doable,” Trump replied:

Yeah. When you go into a hotel and you say, “Let me see your pass,” and you have a woman that’s worked there, as, you know, as a maid, as a cleaner, as a this, as a that, as a waitress, a lot of good things — great jobs — and all of a sudden, they’re being taken out of the country, it’s tough, it’s a tough thing. Also, 25 million people came in … that’s a lot of people to take out. But there’s a group of people that I would say on the sort of pretty far right, that would like everybody taken out. And there’s a group of people …

Douthat: Do any of those people work in your administration? Are they in the building with us right now?

Trump: No. No. Well, there are a lot of those people. Then there’s also people that are more modified on that. In other words, get the killers out, get the rapists out, get all the rough ones out. Get the drug dealers out. But let the people that are here and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years, work a deal for them.

Trump said he could work with Democrats on keeping illegals in the country, even mentioning far-left James Talarico, whom he has previously called “Talafreako,” as an example.