Trump agrees the war raised gasoline prices but would start it again
Vice President JD Vance spent Tuesday night in the White House East Room watching the midterm results roll in alongside President Trump. The Senate seat he had briefly held in Ohio flipped to Democratic control, and Democrats took the rest of Congress, delivering Republican losses in states that had not sent Democrats to the Senate in decades. Vance, who had campaigned heavily in the midterms to stave off those losses, moved his frustration into public view by Wednesday morning, writing on social media that the war in Iran was the reason the party lost.
In a lengthy post, Vance said Republican voters who had supported Trump in 2024 turned out but were angry about the war, the resulting higher energy prices and what he described as the administration’s abandonment of its “America First” agenda. “The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote. Pointing to the Senate result, he added: “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.”
Asked whether Vance was right that the war was to blame for the Republican losses, Trump said, “I think it’s largely true because it drove the gasoline up a little bit short term.” Trump added that if he had to start the war again, he would, “because long term, it’s the only answer. You can’t allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
Trump said he thought Vance’s post was good — “I thought it was good” — and said, “I know how he feels about it,” acknowledging that he had long known the vice president’s views on the campaign. Asked about Vance potentially running for president, Trump, standing at the White House ballroom construction project, shrugged. “Maybe he won’t run. I don’t know who’s going to run,” he said.
Vance’s public break came after months of internal debate over the conflict and after he had repeatedly defended the campaign in public while serving as the administration’s lead on peace negotiations with Iran. In September, Vance told reporters he would not call the fighting in Iran a war, but also could not say when the conflict would end. He has privately discussed with Trump the possibility of the Iran war extending through the end of his second term, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
Vance’s comments followed weeks of internal discussion at the White House about the war’s impact on the midterms and about whether to acknowledge publicly ongoing strikes, according to people familiar with the discussions. In September, senior Trump administration officials held a Situation Room discussion about the war’s unpopularity. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others sat around the table as top officials said disclosing continuing strikes, whether defensive or offensive, would hurt Republicans in vulnerable states. The officials agreed that advertising the assaults would not help election prospects, the people said. That idea was briefed to Trump, who agreed with the approach, the people said.
In the weeks that followed, the U.S. military quietly conducted small-scale defensive strikes on Iran, attacking missile launchers and other equipment while avoiding human casualties, the Journal reported. In one instance on Monday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired a surface-to-air missile at a U.S. jet fighter, which fired back in self-defense, officials said. One reason for keeping the campaign quiet was to avoid signaling any intention of resuming major combat operations.
The rifts inside the administration have widened over the campaign’s direction. Some White House advisers have pointed fingers at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whom they blame for convincing Trump that the Iran war would be a short engagement similar to the successful capture of ousted Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, according to people familiar with the discussions. Hegseth has frequently been the voice in the cabinet advocating to continue the war, often in opposition to Rubio, Vance and others who pushed for peace talks, some people said.
Pentagon officials and others have for weeks insisted that Trump likes Hegseth and is not considering firing him. Trump said he expects no changes to his cabinet or broader team during the lame-duck period before Democrats take control of Congress in January, and said Hegseth is “doing a very good job.” Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell said Hegseth “will not back down or be deterred by politicians seeking to score partisan points or launch phony investigations where no wrongdoing exists.” Parnell added that Hegseth is “100% committed to leading the Department until the end of President Trump’s term in office.”
As the administration weighs its next steps, some officials are pushing Trump to launch fresh military strikes on Iran and then push for peace during the lame-duck period, while others say he should cut his losses and wind down the military operation, according to people familiar with deliberations. The Pentagon has been preparing to resume major combat operations for weeks, amassing thousands of pounds of munitions and moving additional air defense and ships to the region, the Journal reported. A third aircraft-carrier strike group and an additional Marine expeditionary unit are moving toward the Middle East, adding as much as 9,000 to 10,000 more troops to the region.
It was not clear whether Vance coordinated his post with the White House in advance, though it is not typical for the vice president to review his social media with the administration. A White House official said the president was aware of Vance’s message before it was published.
Iranian officials have treated the midterm result as their own victory. “The Iranian nation handed Trump a strategic defeat on the battlefield and in Hormuz—and a POLITICAL DEFEAT in Washington,” Mohsen Rezaei, a top Iranian security official, wrote in a social-media post on Wednesday.
On the options available to the administration, Jonathan Panikoff, a former top U.S. intelligence official on the Middle East, said, “Keeping the blockade on, continuing to escort tankers, and looking for an off-ramp through a negotiated settlement, these are going to be the least bad choices for the president. There are no good options here. There’s only bad, worse, and worst.”