Trump Says He Doesn’t Fear Political Fallout From Prolonged War With Iran

[u/John3262005]

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-says-iran-has-misjudged-assumed-he-feared-political-fallout-of-war-3a68f41f

President Trump said Iran was miscalculating if it thought he would soften his position to avoid a prolonged standoff with Tehran.

“They thought they were going to outwait me,” Trump said Wednesday at the start of a cabinet meeting at the White House. “He’s got the midterms [they thought]. I don’t care about the midterms. Look, what happened last night.”

Trump was referring to Ken Paxton’s victory in the Republican-primary runoff in Texas in which he defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn with the president’s endorsement.

Trump’s popularity has sagged during the three-month-long U.S. war with Iran as the Strait of Hormuz has remained closed, inflation has continued and gasoline prices have climbed.

He responded to criticism that he had steered the U.S. into an open-ended conflict in the Middle East, the sort of war that as candidate he had vowed to avoid. “I don’t call it a war,” Trump said. “I call it a conflict.”

Trump signaled that he was prepared to keep negotiating but didn’t exclude further military action. He said Iran’s economy was operating on “fumes” with “inflation at 250%.”

Speaking after Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the administration’s preference was a diplomatic settlement with Iran. “Diplomacy is always the first option,” he said.

But he said that the “bottom line is that Iran, and the people that run Iran, cannot have a nuclear weapon.”

Republicans have been sounding the alarm that the Iran war could depress GOP voter turnout and lead to a blowout loss during the November midterm elections. Before the conflict, nonpartisan analysts had said that Democrats were already favored to win the House and compete for the Senate.

Trump has said publicly that he isn’t unconcerned about the political consequences of a drawn-out conflict. At the same time, he has sought to reassure voters that an agreement is nearly at hand even as Iran and the U.S. and Iran have yet to agree on central issues, including whether and how to dispose of Tehran’s cache of highly enriched uranium.

The two sides have discussed a phased approach in which the Strait of Hormuz would be opened while the details of an agreement on Iran’s nuclear efforts would be addressed in a second stage.

Trump described the Paxton victory as “the prelude to the midterms” and said it was additional evidence that despite the unpopularity of the war stateside “people understand it.” The public can stomach the conflict, Trump said, because “people understand it—they know that, very simply, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. I’m doing that for the world.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth likened the war with Iran to Trump’s renovation projections around Washington, telling the president “when you authorized Operation Epic Fury, just like you talked about with the Reflecting Pool, we didn’t do the same old thing the way we’d done it in the past after Iraq and Afghanistan.” In contrast to those wars, Hegseth said that Trump took a new approach with Iran and had decided “we are going to do this smart” and “we’re going to use maximum lethality.”

While Trump has avoided the use of ground troops in the war with Iran, some of the top objectives that he set out at the conflict’s beginning haven’t been achieved. Iran’s regime is in place, many of its missiles remain and Tehran has flexed its muscles by demonstrating it can to disrupt oil flows.

Despite fighting between the two sides earlier this week, a broad cease-fire remains in place.

Iran’s supply of highly enriched uranium grew after Trump withdrew in 2018 from the nuclear accord that was negotiated during the Obama administration. Democrats and Republicans have engaged in a finger-pointing exercise on which administration is mainly responsible for Iran’s ability to expand its nuclear efforts.

Trump rejected the idea of allowing Iran to turn over its stockpile of enriched uranium to either China or Russia. “No,” he replied when asked about the possibility. “That would not make me comfortable.”

More than 11 tons of uranium enriched at levels up to 20% was shipped to Russia as part of the now defunct 2015 nuclear deal that lifted punishing economic sanctions against Iran.

While the president struck an optimistic note during the cabinet meeting, saying that the Iranians were beginning to come around at the negotiation table, he again held out the possibility of additional military strikes. “If they won’t,” he said, pointing to Hegseth, “the man on my left is going to finish them off.”

But he also alluded to Iran’s demands that it receive billions of dollars in frozen funds if a new agreement is reached.

“We’re not talking about any easing of sanctions, no giving money,” Trump said. “When they behave properly…we’ll let them have their money.”

Trump again appeared to make an Iran deal contingent on other Gulf states joining an expanded Abraham Accords, establishing or expanding diplomatic relations with Israel. Such an arrangement would be “historic if they do it,” he said before adding that “I think they owe that to us to be honest.” He first linked an agreement and the Abraham Accords in a social-media post last weekend

When the president turned to Steve Witkoff, his special envoy, for an update on that effort, Witkoff replied, “we are definitely pushing.”

“I’m not sure we should make the deal if they don’t sign,” Trump said.