Trump May Miss His Principled Opponents
His new friends are not only his adversaries of yore, but the obstacles to policies he wants now—particularly peace in Iran.
On the surface there are no three politicians more different than John Cornyn, Thomas Massie, and Bill Cassidy, the three Republican lawmakers whose current stints in Congress were recently ended by President Donald Trump.
Massie is the only one of this trio who might have a political future. Although he lost by nearly 10 points, he won a shade more than 45 percent of the vote to Cornyn’s 36 percent and Cassidy’s just under 25 percent.
But the truth is, Trump has never cared much for either the GOP establishment institutionalists like Cornyn and Cassidy or the strict constitutionalists of Massie’s ilk. While they are coming from radically different places both in terms of policy and institutional power (one faction ran the party for decades, the other was a rump within it long before Trump), they both are always telling Trump he can’t do stuff.
The main innovation is that, almost midway through Trump’s second term, even as the rest of the electorate turns against him, he has convinced the Republican base that these are equivalent examples of the kind of principled loserdom the party turned to him to reject 10 years ago. During the Tea Party era in the years before Trump, the Massies of the world were increasingly defeating the Cornyns and Cassidys in Republican primaries (and conventions). In 2026, the president doesn’t have much use for either of them.
In the process, Trump has tamed the Freedom Caucus, that group of recalcitrant House conservatives that effectively ended multiple Republican speakerships. Some establishment figures have proven malleable enough to make peace with Trump as well. Cornyn and Cassidy belatedly tried.
But will the old guard that made their peace with Trump be willing to make peace, with Trump? Not if that means ending the war in Iran, it seems.
When the latest reports came that Trump was once again looking for an exit, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi wasn’t pleased. “The rumored 60-day ceasefire — with the belief that Iran will ever engage in good faith — would be a disaster,” Wicker posted on X. “Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught!”
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Trump buddy who has already gone on record saying Republican congressional majorities should be sacrificed in Iran, sounded a similar note.
“It makes one wonder why the war started to begin with if these perceptions are accurate,” Graham wrote, referring to limits to what can be realistically achieved in Iran within a timeframe that American people will tolerate. He seems close to an epiphany, but then comes the second part: “I personally am a skeptic of the idea that Iran cannot be denied the ability to terrorize the Strait and the region cannot protect itself against Iranian military capability.”
The White House seemingly recognizes the gulf between Graham and reality. One official told the Washington Examiner’s Byron York that Graham’s view “is always that the cost is worth the benefit. And that’s just not how the president sees these things.” This official concluded that Trump and Graham have “a fundamentally different way of thinking about things, a fundamentally different bias.”
Historically, that has been true—until, it seems, fairly recently.
Now it is the hawks who are telling Trump he cannot do something that he clearly wants to do. Will he find them as inconvenient as libertarian congressmen and Senate parliamentarians? Does he not see that Mitch McConnell, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and most of his original GOP tormentors hail from the uber-interventionist wing of the party? Or, having alienated the last Republicans who might actually support his diplomacy, does Trump now have nowhere else to go?
For various reasons, Tulsi Gabbard and Thomas Massie will soon be gone from Washington, at least for the foreseeable future. Lindsey Graham is likely to remain. This may have looked to Trump like clearing barriers to action just a few weeks ago. But the obstacles may soon come from the company Trump currently keeps.
If Trump can bring the war to a just conclusion, hopefully erstwhile allies who have long been supportive of that goal—mostly because they opposed going to war in the first place—will not embark on a revenge tour of their own.
The better course in this instance would be for them to remain annoyingly principled.
The post Trump May Miss His Principled Opponents appeared first on The American Conservative.
