Congress defeat: How Trump’s allies are distancing themselves from Iran war

Vice President JD Vance has blamed the war on Iran for the Republican Party’s sweeping defeat in Tuesday’s midterm elections , in which Democrats won control of both chambers of the United States Congress. “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote in a lengthy post on X on Wednesday. Senator Ted Cruz, a longtime Iran hawk, also turned on the conflict, saying in an episode of his podcast on Wednesday that it “should have been brief, decisive, and over”.

This week, President Donald Trump has insisted that he has no regrets. “I did the right thing. I would have done it again,” he told The Wall Street Journal about launching a war on Iran alongside Israel in February. Vance, a likely 2028 presidential candidate and heir apparent to Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, questioned whether the war had been worth the political cost.

“If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so,” he wrote. Cruz’s criticism came from another direction.