WASHINGTON (TNND) — Lara Trump said that the Iran war “could cost” her father-in-law, President Donald Trump, the midterm elections, but is worth preventing the Middle Eastern country from building nuclear weapons.
On Tuesday, British journalist Harry Cole asked Trump, a former Republican National Committee co-chair, on his show “Harry Cole Saves the West” about the Iran war’s effect on the midterms, adding that it “could cost” the president “his legacy.”
“Well, it could cost him these midterms,” Trump said. “I think Donald Trump’s legacy has yet to be written and I think that, in a lot of ways, maybe, you know — I still say he’s going to go down in history as one of the greatest presidents, if not, the greatest, America has ever seen.”
Trump added that the president “really hates the way that things have gone with Iran” and wished that “things had more swiftly happened.”
“But you’re right, the Iranians are absolutely holding out until these midterm elections,” she continued. “They want to do everything they can to damage this president’s hopes of these midterms going his way because they think it’s going to give them an advantage. This is a rogue regime, these people are absolute lunatics over there, they’re very hard to deal with.
“But I don’t think anyone would have been able to do what this president has done in the Middle East overall, where now you have a conglomerate of countries who are now basically full-blown allies of the United States — when had we ever been able to say that before, other than Israel? And now you have a situation where you’re not gonna have Iran developing a nuclear weapon. This conflict will end, it’s not ending as quickly as everybody wants, but believe me, the only person who I think could absolutely do the right job here is this president.”
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has claimed he wants a peace deal before November, telling reporters at the United Nations General Assembly last week, “We don’t want it to get to the midterm elections,” The Hill reported.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps recently urged Americans to make the war politically costly for the president as the midterm elections approach.
Cole asked Trump if the president had done enough to make the case for the Iran war to the American public amid increasing gas prices.
Trump said Americans feel “far removed” from Iran geographically and that it is a “huge challenge for the president to relay the severity of the situation to the American people.”
She noted that her father-in-law “talks about it a lot, but I think it would be beneficial to hear from other Republicans, from other folks at the White House, from other people out there in this space, more about exactly what was on the line and kind of how close I think we were to the world being a very different and very scary place if Iran ever actually developed that nuclear weapon.”
Cole later pressed Trump on whether the president believes that the Iran war is worth losing both chambers in November to the Democrats.
“Yeah,” she said. “Look, I think he just understands that when Iran gets a nuclear weapon, it doesn’t matter who is in charge of the House. It doesn’t matter the majority in the Senate. This world is a really frightening place and you really can’t come back from that.”
Trump added that Americans don’t receive the intelligence briefings that the president does, which allowed him to understand that “the bigger issue at hand was Iran, was their nuclear capabilities and ensuring that this wasn’t a problem that we were just gonna put a band-aid on, like so many other people had prior to this president — he really wanted to fix the problem.”
When asked about the president viewing the political consequences of the Iran war as being a secondary issue, Trump said, “Well, I think, for him, the safety and security of the American people is what he swore an oath to uphold and protect, and that’s his number-one job.
“And then, of course, he would love to have the House and Senate there to back him up and support him as he progresses with his agenda in, you know, the last two years in office, but he wasn’t willing to do it at the expense of, you know, the safety and security of every American.”
The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has lasted seven months as of Monday, which the president had originally said would be an “excursion” that would conclude on a much shorter timeline.
Republican Congress members have largely supported the president’s’s decision to launch strikes against Iran, but ahead of the midterms, some have called for a quick end to the war to allow gas prices to moderate.
After the initial strikes in February, Iran closed off the Strait of Hormuz, effectively cutting off about 20% of the world’s oil from being exported globally through the waterway. The president has defended the subsequently higher gas prices as a “very inexpensive price to pay” to stop Iran.