On Monday, Israel and Iran announced that they would pause attacks after President Donald Trump pleaded with the two nations to stop firing at each other. The hostilities came after Iran launched missiles into Israel after Israel fired into the outskirts of Beirut into Lebanon.
Trump issued a stern warning to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, telling Axios, “If Bibi strikes them back it’s just gonna keep going like the last 47 years, or the last 3,000 years.”
It’s just the latest sign of how fragile the powder keg Trump set off in the Middle East is. Ostensibly, a ceasefire has been in place between the United States and Iran since April. But the president has broadened the definition of the ceasefire to include “shooting in a moderate manner,” as he told reporters last week.
And Americans are getting sick of this game of chicken with Iran. An Economist/YouGov poll showed that 64 percent of Americans disapprove of the war in Iran. The same poll showed that 55 percent of Americans said that going to war with Iran was the wrong decision.
So, the laws of political gravity should mean that Republicans — with only 217 seats in the House of Representatives and 53 seats in the Senate — would break away from the president and an unpopular war. That hasn’t been the case.
There are three major reasons for this: For one, Trump is largely doing what a lot of Republicans want to do. In the case of the war in Iran, many Republicans have seen the regime as an existential threat ever since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Trump’s wild gyrations and uneven focus are simply the price of finally toppling the ayatollah. The same can be true for immigration and tax cuts; while they may have squirmed at the execution, many of them are still border hawks who want deportation.
But the war in Iran and immigration aside, the bigger fact remains that for many, even as they are liberated from no longer having to worry about their primary election, they still risk the wrath of an angry president who can release a single Truth Social post lambasting them that triggers an the onslaught of online criticism, death threats and even threats to their children and loved ones.
On top of that, criticizing the president too much automatically excludes Republican lawmakers from being able to craft policy on their other priorities. So, like Henry Hill in Goodfellas, they have to sit there and take it, not from a mob boss but from the president who himself is a fan of mob movies.
Last week, the House of Representatives narrowly passed a War Powers Act resolution on Iran. It would require that troops be withdrawn between 60 to 90 days unless Congress declared war and that the president notify Congress within 48 hours of committing forces into action.
But only four Republicans — Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Tom Barrett of Michigan— joined every Democrat to pass the resolution.
That slim margin of the willing on the Republican side does not bode well for the measure’s needed passage in the Senate. Why is that? It’s simple: Republicans are still afraid of Donald Trump’s wrath — even after he has killed their political careers.
After the vote, Trump told The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg that the vote was “a meaningless, unpatriotic waste of time, very unpatriotic to do.”
And earlier this year, he lashed out at the five Republicans who voted on a motion to proceed on a War Powers resolution on Venezuela, saying they “should never be elected to office again.” Ultimately, two of them flipped their votes on the actual legislation and it died.
The moment proved that Trump still has incredible sway over the GOP.
Look no further than Massie, who lost his primary last month after Trump repeatedly bashed him for breaking with Republicans. Massie never let Trump get in the way of voting the way he wants, but he has even less of an incentive to do so now that he’s been primaried and lost.
But Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who had joined Massie’s discharge petition to force a vote to release files, did not join the resolution, even though she had told The Independent months ago that she might.
One reason why? Because Mace is running for governor and needs as many Trump supporters as possible. But Trump punctured a hole in that dream last month when he endorsed lieutenant governor of the state, all but guaranteeing that she will lose.
The same can be said about Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) who also joined the Epstein discharge petition and campaigned with Massie.
And even in the Senate, Republicans are still afraid of crossing Trump after he vanquishes them. Late last month, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) voted on a motion to proceed for a War Powers Act resolution after he lost his primary to a Trump-endorsed challenger.
That gave the resolution enough votes to move to the next step and signaled that Cassidy could take riskier votes after voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary despite being a physician.
But that doesn’t mean that Cassidy and the rest of the so-called “YOLO” caucus will easily cross Trump.
Last week, during the so-called vote-a-rama to pass Republicans’ planned funding for Immigration and Custom Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agencies, Cassidy agonized about a Democratic amendment that would have killed Trump’s “anti-weaponization” fund. Ultimately, he sided with the rest of the Republicans to kill the amendment and moved on.
Cassidy and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who is retiring, ultimately tried to pass another amendment to drain the fund that some fear will be used to financially compensate January 6 rioters who assaulted Capitol police officers. But that initiative failed and the ICE funding package cleared the Senate without any guardrails against the fund.
It’s a sign that there are limits to how much Republicans, even those who lost their races, are willing to cross the president. Despite the fact the president has repeatedly antagonized the House and Senate GOP conference, Trump still leads the conference and there is little incentive to cross him.
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