Trump fans at CPAC hope for the best in Iran but worry over the cost at home
At CPAC, various speakers and conference attendees said the best outcome of this war would be the Iranian people to do the hard work of overthrowing the theocratic regime. So far, the popular uprising encouraged by Trump at the start of the war has not happened.
In a panel discussion on Iran, moderator Mercedes Schlapp, a senior White House official during Trump’s first term, said a “protracted” war was “not where I think the American people want to be.” She asked a panelist, Hiva Wallace, of the nonprofit, nonpartisan United Against a Nuclear Iran, what her message would be to those who share that view.
“I can promise you, the Iranian people are ready to return to the streets,” Wallace said.
Yet one of the world’s best-known MAGA figures has warned that the war may only be in its early stages. Steve Bannon, who was a senior White House official during Trump’s first term, told the CPAC audience: “Your sons, daughters, granddaughters, grandsons could be on the island of Kharg and hold a beachhead over the Strait of Hormuz.” »
Bannon said people need to “support” Trump, but they need to decide for themselves that the war is worth fighting.
A former naval officer, Bannon told the CPAC audience that he once crossed the Strait of Hormuz aboard a destroyer and suggested the experience was harrowing.
“Let me tell you, it looks like the surface of the moon,” he recalls. “It couldn’t be more foreign to people in the United States.”
CPAC is a bulwark of Trump’s political movement, and it wasn’t hard to find attendees who came out all-in for what Trump has sometimes called a war, sometimes an “excursion” and, more recently, a “military operation.”
One of them was Rafael Cruz, the 87-year-old father of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
“I think we have to cut off the head of the snake and make sure that the people take over Iran,” he said in an interview, “because otherwise they will come together again and they will always have the idea that they want to build a bomb.”
The elder Cruz was in the 2016 presidential race, when his son was a candidate for the GOP nomination against Trump. At the time, Trump invoked a National Enquirer photo purporting to show Rafael Cruz with Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy, before the killing. The tabloid’s ex-editor later admitted that the photo was a fake.
“I have no hard feelings,” Rafael Cruz told NBC News. “In the political arena, people speak against their opponent. I support Trump 100%.”
