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After a notable absence, an anti-war movement has emerged to finally challenge a president over the unpopular conflict in Iran. Not in the streets so much, but in ads and statements from Republicans trying to salvage their doomed election campaigns.
“The war with Iran needs to end and end quickly,” said Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers in a digital ad. Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) made almost the same verbatim statement to Politico, suggesting some coordination among this new iteration of the National Mobilization Committee. Even Michael Whatley, the former Republican National Committee chair currently being left for dead in North Carolina’s Senate race against former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, tentatively conceded that farmers were being hurt from the conflict due to fuel and fertilizer prices.
“I just believe we should be exiting Iran, that it’s time to move on,” agreed Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Rep. Tom Tiffany, who incidentally wasn’t present for a vote to end the war when he had an opportunity last week. Two of Tiffany’s Republican colleagues in the neighboring state of Iowa, Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn, did vote for the war powers resolution to end the war, making a total of seven Republicans helping to pass that resolution through the House. Rep. Ashley Hinson, running for Senate in Iowa, said Monday that “the war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end,” despite voting against that war powers resolution just days earlier, the sixth time she has done so this year. The Senate version of that war powers vote, held on Thursday, failed, with Husted and all other Republicans fretting about re-election (except Susan Collins, who has voted for war powers resolutions before) voting against stopping the war.
The key here is that on everything that matters, Trump and Republicans in Congress are fully aligned.
The national media loves itself some good intraparty conflict. Stories about the Republican “fever breaking,” egged on by Democratic leaders, have been a perennial since before Donald Trump descended the golden escalator. Now, with less than 40 days to an election that is shaping up to be an epochal disaster for the GOP, that long-anticipated distancing from the most unpopular president headed into a midterm since Harry Truman in 1946 is upon us. Not just the war, but a growing number of Trump’s policies are being condemned, debated, and rejected, at rapid speed.
As a policy and even a political matter, this shift is almost 700 days late and about $3 trillion short. For 99.9 percent of the past two years, Republicans have fallen in line with every insane maneuver and utterance from this administration; at best, they would pretend not to have heard them. Only when accountability from the voters is imminent have we seen the emergence of “independent” thought and behavior—that is, evasive action induced solely by panicked self-interest, like an amoeba shrinking away from a sharp object.
To be heartened by the courage of Paul LePage, running in a Trump +9 seat in northern Maine that was recently shifted to a toss-up by none other than Fox News, for speaking out that his son-in-law’s father is “being deported because he came from a country that’s not liked by certain people in Washington,” you would have to ignore LePage’s long history of anti-immigrant and racist remarks and his ad released just this week proudly touting his record facilitating deportation as governor. To raise a fist in solidarity with Maria Elvira Salazar, in a +15 Trump seat, running an ad about Trump’s deportation policies going too far, you would have to forget her vote to set up and fund the current mass deportation architecture. So did Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, who recently castigated ICE for not working with local law enforcement in the state.
The fact that Husted and Hinson and others wouldn’t vote their own convictions on the Iran war shows how performative and inauthentic this distance is. Trump knows this, which is why you haven’t heard much from him about it. If anything, in fact, his own administration is following the fair-weather detractors, swinging frantically at changes that they hope will make voters forget the last two years.
The Domestic Policy Council is trying to cut Trump’s foreign beef imports, which ranchers have savaged as destructive of their livelihoods and misaligned to bring down retail prices. But the White House denied that anything would change. The Senate is likely to stay in session next week to try to save Sen. Husted’s job with a roll call vote on a bill he co-authored, the Ratepayer Protection Act. This would mirror the White House’s voluntary pledge by utilities that data center development will not raise the cost of power bills. But Trump’s positive outlook on data centers, which is wildly out of step with public opinion, clearly hasn’t changed given the siting of new facilities on public lands. Adding to a voluntary pledge with legislation that is also mostly voluntary—it sets a framework for states to force data center developers to pay for utility upgrades, without requiring that states apply those rules—won’t erase this position.
The most farcical example of save-the-majority-based policymaking is how to handle the record high cost of diesel fuel, a function of both the Iran debacle and Ukrainian pulverizing of Russian refining infrastructure. The easiest way to ease energy spikes stemming from war would be to, you know, end the wars, but instead Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK), threatened with the loss of his seat, demanded an executive order to temporarily ban diesel exports. Trump lunged at this and a 90-day ban is in process, even as Trump’s own energy secretary said it wouldn’t work. The problem is that diesel is largely refined on the Gulf Coast, and there is no easy way to move it domestically elsewhere in the nation. It follows that higher global prices (which an export ban would perpetuate) would increase costs within parts of the U.S. that get imported diesel. Plus, refiners are not guaranteed to pass through savings that come with higher domestic supply, and storage needs would likely slow down gas refining and shift the price spike toward that product.
The key here is that on everything that matters—war and peace, the actual implementation of deportation policy, even absurd things like the diesel export ban—Trump and Republicans in Congress are fully aligned. Anything above a meek plea that they feel the pain they inflicted on voters, or would do anything whatsoever about it the second the election is over, is not in evidence.
Since January 20, 2025, the Republican Congress could have stopped the imposition of tariffs through existing mechanisms. They could have cut off funding for wars they don’t like. They could have tied continued defiance of appropriations laws they passed by cutting the personal presidential travel budget. They could have impeached and removed him from office, with Democratic support. Instead they support Trump’s every whim in almost perfect lockstep, no matter how crazy. These deathbed conversions are preposterous, and everybody knows it.
One final thought: I understand why congressional Republicans are worried about losing their fancy offices and the pretend trappings of a power they chose not to wield. I’m less sure why Trump cares. Sure, in theory, a Democratic Congress could take up the countermeasures Republicans refused to enact and halt Trump’s expansive agenda. But given what we’ve just seen on the Paramount merger, it’s a real stretch to think that Democrats have the will or fortitude or even interest in doing that. So what’s Trump so concerned about?
