The Iran War Is Eating the GOP’s Midterm Message Alive
The Bulwark · C · trust 52/100
Mike Johnson and his colleagues would prefer to talk about literally anything else.
Will Saletan August 20 Upgrade to listen 11 minutes 430 44 28 (Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/ The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock) HOUSE REPUBLICAN LEADERS had a bullish plan for the August congressional recess. They would visit swing districts around the country, raising money for their candidates and delivering the party’s campaign message. They would crow about the economy and paint Democrats as Communists.
Unfortunately, the plan has run into a problem: the Iran war.
On their favorite national TV outlets, Fox News and Newsmax, the GOP leaders get free rein to spout their talking points. The anchors try not to mention the war or gas prices. But in swing districts, these topics keep coming up. The party’s leaders struggle for answers. And the more they talk, the more they tie themselves in knots.
TWO WEEKS AGO, Speaker Mike Johnson went to Arizona to help Republican congressional candidates. While he was there, he gave an interview to Politico ’s Dasha Burns. She told him that his colleagues were freaking out :
I can’t tell you, Speaker, how many times I talk to Republicans . . . that are trying to win seats, that are tearing their hair out because they don’t know how to message this war. They don’t know how to talk to voters about what great achievements the president has made on the economy, when [voters] are unhappy with what they’re paying at the pump and what they’re paying at the grocery store. Like, how are Republicans supposed to contend with this?
Johnson argued that his colleagues could brag about “the return of American energy dominance and the return of peace through strength.” But that answer just raised more questions. If energy production is thriving, why are we paying so much for gas? 1 And if we have peace through strength, why are Iranian drones and missiles still choking off tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz?
In January, House Republicans thought they had a good story to tell in the midterms. The story was that their tax-cut bill was creating jobs and putting money in people’s pockets. But then Trump launched the war. So now the Republicans have to amend their story. They have to explain why grocery prices and other economic indicators regressed after the war started.
On Friday, as Johnson was campaigning in Colorado, he and one of his endangered freshmen, Rep. Gabe Evans, gave a joint interview to Shaun Boyd, a reporter for CBS News Colorado. Boyd asked about surging gas and food prices. Johnson replied that the GOP’s tax cuts “had the desired effect. And in the first quarter this year, the economy was beginning to take off like a rocket. And then we got into the skirmish with Iran. That’s what the prices are related to.”
On Monday, as Johnson campaigned in Virginia with Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans, he was asked again about gas prices and the war. “The Iran conflict has been the cause, of course, of gas prices going up. It’s drug on,” he conceded .
Tom Emmer, the House Republican whip, has the same problem. Two weeks ago on Fox Business, he complained that Republicans weren’t getting credit for reducing egg and milk prices. He chastised the media for focusing instead on high gas prices, which he said were “related to something that has to get done in Iran.”
Was the war really necessary? In his interview in Colorado, Johnson pleaded, “We had to do it. They [Iran] were very close to nuclear capability.” In Virginia, he said Trump “understood their nuclear capability was almost there and that we had to act.” Steve Scalise, the House majority leader, made a similar pitch while visiting Michigan last week.
But as congressional Republicans parrot this Trumpian lie about an imminent threat , the president himself undercuts them. On Monday, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, he boasted that if Iran wanted to build a nuclear weapon, “after what we did previously with the B-2 bombers, it’s going to be a long time.”
In other words, we took out the Iranian nuclear threat last year. This year’s war was gratuitous.
House Republicans also have trouble explaining why Trump didn’t consult Congress. On Friday, when she spoke with Johnson and Evans in Colorado, Boyd pressed Evans: “Shouldn’t the president have come to Congress and asked them to approve [the] war?” Evans replied that Iran had supported al Qaeda, and therefore “the 2001 AUMF”—the authorization passed by Congress twenty-five years ago to use military force in response to 9/11—gave Trump sufficient approval to attack Iran this year. It’s hard to imagine a more dishonest abuse of a congressional resolution.
Johnson keeps trying, doggedly, to peddle Trump’s euphemisms for the war. “As soon as we get the Iran skirmish settled out, I think everybody’s going to have much more economic opportunity,” he told Burns. His use of the word skirmish to describe a six-month war made his prediction seem equally ridiculous.
Meanwhile, Republicans struggle to defend another Trumpian lie: that the United States fully controls the Strait of Hormuz. Last week, when Scalise went to Iowa, Local 5 News reporter Dana Searles pressed him about the war’s effects on gas and fertilizer prices. Scalise danced around the question, leaving it to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was standing next to him. Bessent assured Searles that the United States and its partner countries would soon issue a statement “to call for the Iranians to let fertilizer out of the Gulf.” When you’re asking Iran to let ships out of the Gulf, that’s a confession that you don’t have control.
Nor can Republicans explain how the ongoing deployment is both a gift to the world and a defense of America’s interests. Johnson told Burns that voters supported Trump because the president stood for “America First.” But in the same interview, the speaker predicted that other nations would step in to keep the Strait of Hormuz open “because most countries have a…
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