Political Losses Deepen the Stakes as Trump Contemplates Renewed Iran Attack

NY Times-Nov5th2026

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.

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.

If Mr. Vance’s logic wins the day, Mr. Trump will now resume negotiations, hoping to get some kind of agreement tougher than the cease-fire pact he signed in June, only to see it fall apart within weeks.

If Mr. Trump truly believes force will make a difference, he could order a resumption of bombing, though it is unclear why he might expect the outcome to be different than it was in the spring. Thirty-eight days of continuous attacks failed to collapse the regime, recover Iran’s vast stockpile of nuclear fuel, eliminate its missile stores or lead to what he once insisted would be “unconditional surrender.”

Now he is negotiating from a weaker hand, and the Iranians know it. “The elections decided the fate of the war,” Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli intelligence officer who focused on Iran for two decades, said on Wednesday. “The only question is how it will end: with a bang, a peaceful, negotiated but likely unsatisfactory solution, or Trump saying, ‘JD Vance was right, and goodbye.’”