At CPAC, various speakers and conferencegoers said that the better outcome in this war would be for the Iranian people to do the hard work of ousting the theocratic regime. So far, the popular uprising that Trump encouraged at the start of the war hasn’t happened.
In one panel devoted to Iran, moderator Mercedes Schlapp, a senior White House official in Trump’s first term, said that a “prolonged” war is “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 hold that view.
“I can promise you, the Iranian people are ready to go back on the street,” Wallace said.
Still, one of MAGA world’s best-known personalities cautioned that the war may just be in its beginning phase. Steve Bannon, who was a senior White House official in Trump’s first term, told the CPAC audience: “Your sons, daughters, granddaughters, grandsons could be on Kharg Island and holding a beachhead on the Strait of Hormuz.”
Bannon said that people need to have Trump’s “back” but should decide for themselves that the war is worth fighting.
A former Naval officer, Bannon told the CPAC audience that he once transited the Strait of Hormuz on a destroyer and suggested the experience was harrowing.
“Let me tell you, it looks like the surface of the moon,” he recalled. “It couldn’t be more foreign to folks in the United States.”
CPAC is a rampart of Trump’s political movement, and it wasn’t hard to find attendees who are all-in for what Trump has at times called a war, at others an “excursion” and, more recently, a “military operation.”
One was Rafael Cruz, the 87-year-old father of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
“I think we need to cut the head of the snake and make sure the people take over Iran,” he said in an interview, “because otherwise they’ll reconstitute again and they still have the idea they want to build a bomb.”
The elder Cruz figured in the 2016 presidential race, when his son was a candidate running for the GOP nomination against Trump. At the time, Trump invoked a National Enquirer photo purporting to show Rafael Cruz in the company of Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, before the murder. The tabloid’s ex-publisher later admitted the photo was a fake.
“I don’t carry grudges,” Rafael Cruz told NBC News. “In the political arena, people speak against their opponent. I support Trump 100%.”
