The war in Iran has split the Republican consensus. A realignment is now underway

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last night, U.S. President Donald Trump reflected on the role that the war in Iran played in the Republicans’ crushing defeat in the mid-term elections. “I think part of what happened is down to Iran,” said the US President. However, despite the defeats and his campaign promise not to embark on new wars in the Middle East, Trump reiterated that attacking the Islamic Republic of Iran had been the right decision, and admitted that he would do so again.

Many do not share his view: the Democrats’ election campaign, which ultimately proved successful, focused heavily on the ever-rising cost of living, caused by two decisions attributable to the president – tariffs and the decision to engage in armed conflict with Iran. In many contests during the election campaign, the Republicans had to strike a balance between supporting the President’s policies and acknowledging the economic costs of war: some criticised Trump’s decision to open an armed front, but they did so too late. For example, Iowa Senate candidate Ashley Hinson, whilst a member of the House of Representatives, voted six times against Democratic resolutions that would have limited Trump’s ability to carry out military operations, but in the last month she changed her position and stated that “the people of Iowa should not have to pay the cost of the conflict with Iran”.

Similarly, Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers, a hawk in May when he described the war in Iran as a ‘win-win-win’ operation, turned out to be opposed to military action in October, calling for ‘a swift end to the conflict’. Similarly, the candidate in Texas, Ken Paxton, despite publicly stating as recently as October that he “supported everything the president was doing” in Iran, was privately complaining – as revealed by Axios – about the political damage the war was causing the party. Commenting on the election campaign on Monday, the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, stated that the conflict had been “a drag on the Republicans”.

In recent months, the coalition that had secured Trump’s victory in 2024 had already fractured deeply over support for military operations in Iran. The isolationist wing of the MAGA movement has long since disowned the president for what it sees as a veritable betrayal. Anchorman Tucker Carlson is now at loggerheads with the White House: two days ago, he even wrote on X that Trump was reportedly deciding whether to use a nuclear bomb against Iran by 7 November, stating that “the global population is not being consulted”. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones immediately reposted Carlson’s message and claimed that, should Trump decide to use a nuclear weapon, he should be removed under the 25th Amendment – the provision that transfers the president’s powers to his vice-president following a majority vote by members of the government.

For all these months, Trump has referred to this wing of the conservatives as ‘not real MAGA’, reiterating that the only ones who can call themselves that are those who follow the President’s lead. Steve Bannon, in an interview with the Financial Times conducted shortly before the election, stated that the Republican Party would soon be embroiled in a civil war over its future, and that if Donald Trump were to resume military operations against Iran, people would go mad. Venture capitalist and leading figure of the new tech right Peter Thiel also criticised the conflict, expressing scepticism about the war and stating that, in his view, the United States should never have opened a new front.

The rift over this issue has reached the highest echelons of the Party. US Vice-President J. D. Vance, previously an advocate of the need for a lasting peace agreement with Tehran, was very harsh in a post on X. “The most serious problem,” he wrote, “is that many people who voted for us in 2024 chose the Democrats in 2026”. He went on to say that voters had made their position clear: they want an end to the war, greater attention to the cost of living (which Trump has repeatedly dismissed as nonsense) and a change in relations with Israel. “The reason we lost is the war,” Vance concluded.