Republicans’ Post-Midterms War Denialism Is an Exercise in Special Pleading

Politics Just because it wasn’t only the war doesn’t mean it wasn’t mainly the war. Republicans took a pounding on Tuesday that made past wave elections look like a mild drizzle by comparison. Just whatever you do, don’t blame the Iran war. In a bizarre crashout in the early morning hours after the GOP’s midterm debacle, the radio commentator Erick Erickson likened blaming the war for the result to pretending the 2020 election was stolen. That bold truth-teller Sen. Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who slithered away rather than defend his Senate seat in a supposed act of defiance against President Donald Trump, also poured cold water on the idea. “Do you honestly believe, for example, respectfully, Mr. Vice President, that we saw the departure of Hispanics over the war?” he asked on CNN the day after the seat he declined to defend fell to the Democrats by 20 points. “Give me a break. It’s more complicated than that." Among the reasons it has taken so long for “standing up to Trump” to go anywhere in the GOP is that until relatively recently, most of the Republicans who do so are worse than he is. But I digress. Vice President J.D. Vance has taken a lot of heat for stating the obvious about the war. Some like to imagine his Trump-ordered Iran diplomacy is somehow a form of insubordination. They should instead ruminate on the number of Republican congressional seats that could have been salvaged if the memorandum of understanding had held and the war had ended in June. The New York Times has confirmed Vance’s account that the White House received polling to that effect. The Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel thinks it’s a “hoot” that Vance recognizes the war’s downsides rather than blaming the tariffs exclusively. “Trump’s first-term success came from largely following that Reagan playbook,” she writes. “The second-term leaned into me-too progressive populism—at the veep’s urging—and it ain’t working.” Or, hear me out, Trump’s first-term success—which still resulted in a 40-seat loss in the 2018 midterm elections—was because he followed the Reagan playbook of limited military interventions, no new foreign wars, and his more limited tariffs regime was compatible with inflation running consistently below the Federal Reserve’s preferred target of 2 percent. The second term leaned into me-too progressive neoconservatism dressed up in “How do you do, fellow MAGA?” populist garb against the veep’s advice, and it ain’t working. That’s not to say the tariffs have helped, especially in the farm states where Republicans took a beating. Anything that cut against affordability was always going to be politically damaging, even if the goal was to reshore jobs. Voters continued to be angry about the economy despite relatively low unemployment under both Trump and former President Joe Biden because of the high cost of living. Beyond the fact of the tariffs, their implementation has been capricious and haphazard. On this, there is much in common with how Trump has conducted the Iran war: purely unilateral moves, no working with Congress or recognizing its constitutional powers, no clear explanation to the public of what is going on or what the point is, and no empathy for families straining under several years of elevated inflation. Even many Buchananite economic nationalists have long favored free trade with Canada and comparable economies, the target of Trump’s current trade war. Perhaps we have been at war with Canada, like Iran, for decades. But the Iran War is the single biggest driver of inflation and the reason it hasn’t continued to come down. The war is the primary reason inflation remains stubbornly above where it would need to be for the Fed to consider lowering interest rates. The spike in gasoline and diesel prices is felt more broadly than the tariffs, and it also makes the tariffs’ bite worse. And for better or worse, Trump never implied he wouldn’t impose tariffs during the 2024 campaign. There is never just one cause of something like the GOP’s midterms flop. Trump’s foibles are what they are at this point, and they aren’t likely to improve at the age of 80. He has never worn well with his more timorous supporters, and he has now been around for a decade. Even in 2006, Republicans had other problems besides the Iraq War. But this furious denial of the war’s impact is reminiscent of those who wanted to blame GOP congressional losses 20 years ago on earmarks. Yes, earmarks often were used for wasteful projects. They were part of the culture of corruption and neatly illustrated Republicans’ abandonment of any pretense of fiscal discipline. But the attempt to pretend they were a bigger driver of the 2006 blue wave than Iraq was always absurd. Hawks are upset today because two decades ago, they would have had a Republican vice president who went along with their ridiculous spin. The persistence of inflation has also elevated other issues like corruption as Republican problems. This cost the GOP seats. This is downstream of the war, which itself alienated some people who voted for Trump and Republicans just two years ago, and left the party limited to voters and media voices who were always going to go down with the ship when the blue wave came. Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox Strassel allows that voters are “unhappy about the war, though the numbers might be different if the president had been clear about an exit strategy.” But hawks and Vance-bashers have made clear they don’t want to hear about exit strategies beyond “Just win, baby!” “I don’t think the war itself was per se a mistake,” Erickson says. “I think half-assing the war was a mistake.” But it is the war itself that led to the Strait of Hormuz quagmire and it is the “half-assing” that is keeping this a more limited, less deadly (to Americans) operation than Iraq. How many times will Republicans in Congress listen to the same people with the same result? Will the last one let us know before they turn out the lights?