At CPAC, various speakers and conference attendees said that a better outcome in this war would be for the Iranian people to make a hard effort to overthrow the theocratic regime. So far, the popular uprising that President Trump encouraged at the start of the war has not occurred.
During a panel discussion on Iran, moderator Mercedes Schlapp, a senior White House official in Trump’s first term, said a “prolonged” war “I don’t think is what the American people want.” She asked Hiba Wallace, a panelist with the nonprofit, nonpartisan Alliance Against Nuclear Iran, what her message would be to people who think like that.
“I can promise you, the Iranian people are ready to get back on the streets,” Wallace said.
Still, one of the most famous figures in the MAGA world warned that the war may have just begun. Steve Bannon, a senior White House official during President Trump’s first term, told the CPAC audience: “Your sons, daughters, granddaughters and grandsons may be on Kharg Island, holding a beachhead in the Strait of Hormuz.”
Mr. Bannon said people needed Mr. Trump’s “support,” but they should decide for themselves whether this war was worth fighting.
Bannon, a former naval officer, told the CPAC audience that he once sailed through the Strait of Hormuz on a destroyer, suggesting the experience was harrowing.
“I’m telling you, it looks like the surface of the moon,” he recalled. “Nothing could be more unfamiliar to the American people.”
CPAC is the rampart of President Trump’s political campaign, and it wasn’t hard to find participants fully engaged in what Trump has sometimes called a war, sometimes a “field trip,” and more recently a “military operation.”
One of them is Rafael Cruz, 87, the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
“I think we need to cut off the head of the snake and ensure that the people take over Iran,” he said in an interview. “Because if they don’t, they’re going to rebuild again and still have the idea that they want to make bombs.”
Mr. Cruz, an elderly man, was active in the 2016 presidential election, when his son was a candidate for the Republican nomination with Mr. Trump. At the time, President Trump cited a National Enquirer photo purporting to show Rafael Cruz with President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, before he was killed. The tabloid’s former publisher later admitted that the photo was fake.
“I don’t hold a grudge,” Rafael Cruz told NBC News. “In the political arena, people speak out against their opponents. I support Trump 100%.”
