Trump's revenge tour made him his own worst enemy: The American Conservative

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a press conference at a NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands June 25, 2025.

President Donald Trump has claimed victory in a string of recent GOP primaries, with the MAGA-oriented candidates he endorsed beating more moderate, mainstream Republicans who have opposed him in one way or another. But while he may be gloating about his short-term wins, even going so far as to say he doesn’t “care about the midterms,” according to the American Conservative, “Trump may miss his principled opponents.”

As writer W. James Antle III explains, “Trump has never cared much for either the GOP establishment institutionalists” like Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bill Cassidy (R- LA) or “strict constitutionalists” like Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), all of whom held strong support among party bosses but fell in the face of the president’s MAGA base. “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.”

On the part of Cassidy and Massie, one of the things they keep telling him not to do is more war with Iran. And it is to that end, Antle suggests, that Trump may end up missing his enemies.

As it becomes increasingly clear that Trump is desperate for an exit from the war he began, he’s getting rid of lawmakers who actually support that intention, while keeping close Republicans who are relentless Iran hawks.

When it was recently reported that Trump was looking for an exit, for example, Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) tweeted, “The rumored 60-day ceasefire — with the belief that Iran will ever engage in good faith — would be a disaster. Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught!”

And few Republicans are as hawkish on Iran as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has even suggested that waging the unpopular war is worth a Republican defeat in the midterms. Graham remains a close ally of Trump’s and has been a relentless advocate of continuing military action.

As Antle notes, “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.’”

And that’s the rub — while Trump now wants to get out of Iran, he’s surrounded by those who want the fighting to go on while he’s eliminated the chorus of Republican voices who actually support ending it.

“Now it is the hawks who are telling Trump he cannot do something that he clearly wants to do,” notes Antle. “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?”

Now, with the anti-interventionalist Massies and Gabbords leaving Washington, the Lindsey Grahams remain.

“This may have looked to Trump like clearing barriers to action just a few weeks ago,” concludes Antle. “But the obstacles may soon come from the company Trump currently keeps.”

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