Republicans gather to discuss how to prevent US-Israel war on Iran from becoming midterm liability
Republicans are meeting for strategy session in Florida to weigh political fallout from war on Iran, waged by Trump, who won 2024 election on promise not to engage in foreign wars.
Lawmakers from US President Donald Trump's Republican Party are gathering for a strategy session in Florida, with one urgent issue topping the agenda: how to prevent the US-Israel war on Iran from becoming a midterm election liability.
The long-planned annual meeting on Monday, hosted this year at Trump’s Miami-area golf club, comes more than a week after he ordered strikes alongside Israel on Iran.
The US-Israeli attacks on Iran triggered a massive ongoing retaliatory strikes across the Middle East and sent ripple effects through global markets.
As crude prices soar to multi-year highs, along with a spike in US fuel prices, Republicans face potential political backlash just eight months before the November vote.
Losing their narrow control of Congress could also derail the final two years of Trump's term in office.
The new open-ended conflict has already divided the president's base, after the 79-year-old business tycoon campaigned on ending overseas wars.
‘Betrayal’
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former close ally of Trump who resigned from Congress after publicly breaking with him, called the new Middle East conflict a "betrayal" of his "MAGA" movement.
Conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly has meanwhile voiced "serious doubts" about the war.
In Congress, only a small number of Republican lawmakers have openly expressed concern about the conflict so far.
Trump and Republicans rode a wave of negative economic sentiment to success in the 2024 elections, but rising costs due to the war could see them in the firing line of voters.
Trump's administration has downplayed the economic impacts of the war, insisting any price hikes would be temporary.
After the price of crude oil shot above $100 a barrel for the first time in years on Sunday, Trump defended the war as a "very small price to pay" for peace and security.
"ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY!" he wrote on his Truth Social platform.