Midterm Election Losses Complicate Trump’s Options on Iran War

Politics

News Analysis

Political Losses Deepen the Stakes as Trump Contemplates Renewed Iran Attack

The midterm results laid bare the deep unpopularity of the war of choice that President Trump started and is now struggling to end.

*An American B-1 bomber taking off from an air base in the United Kingdom earlier this year. Credit...Toby Shepheard/Reuters*

By David E. Sanger

David E. Sanger has covered five American presidents over more than four decades at the Times, often focusing on nuclear competition and the revival of superpower conflict, the subject of his latest book.

Nov. 5, 2026, 5:04 a.m. ET

President Trump’s loss of the House and Senate intersects with one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency: whether to resume intense combat operations against Iran, in a war that Mr. Trump’s vice president said Wednesday was the primary reason for the Republican Party’s crushing defeat.

The results across the country in Tuesday’s midterm elections drove home how deeply unpopular the war was among Americans — and how much backlash Mr. Trump could face if he renewed major strikes against the country, which the United States and Israel jointly attacked in February.

The political blow deepened the challenge Mr. Trump faces in ending a war of his choosing.

He has already hinted that he is in no rush to resume bombing, despite a major naval and air power buildup that has been underway for weeks as he has mulled whether to launch an intense, short attack on Iran’s surviving nuclear-related sites, along with energy and infrastructure targets.

It may yet happen: Past presidents, suddenly plunged into lame-duck status, have often reached for their military options, partly to demonstrate that their role as commander in chief is undiminished. George W. Bush accelerated in Iraq after his historic midterm defeat in 2006, though only after replacing his defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and radically changing his strategy. Within limits, it worked.

But Mr. Trump’s choices in Iran are far more complex.

If the president has a new strategy for prosecuting the war, he and his aides have been silent about it. The rifts in his administration over his decision to go to war, barely hidden from the beginning, broke out into the open as soon as election results were in. “The reason we lost is the war,” Vice President JD Vance wrote in a social media post, claiming the president had made a similar assessment. “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.”

Mr. Trump immediately did so. “I can tell you as far as that war is concerned, I would have done nothing different,” the president said a few hours later, as he gave reporters a tour of his under-construction White House ballroom.