GRAPEVINE, Texas — They still like Donald Trump and trust that he attacked Iran for good reason, but the conservative activists who met here this week worry about the chaos the war may unleash.
If the president ends the conflict soon, if gas prices drop, if no U.S. troops are sent to Iran and if the Iranian people rise up and reclaim their country, the war will have been worth it, many attendees interviewed at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference said.
That’s a lot of ifs. It’s also the best-case scenario for a war that just entered its fifth week, they said. But they acknowledged that the conflict has caused pain at home. And they are uncertain about what might unfold.
Kyle Sims, 61, a Republican strategist in Texas, said in an interview that he supports Trump’s handling of the war, though he added he has “mixed emotions.”
“I know we need to free the Iranian people,” Sims said. “There are some issues in this country I wish we were focused on a little bit more at the same time.”
He mentioned the “outrageous” price of groceries.
“Everyday people are hurting,” he said.
“I don’t think we should put boots on the ground,” added Sims, wearing his Stetson hat. “I don’t want to have another Iraq or Afghanistan.”
The Iran war is the sort of far-flung conflict Trump had once pledged to avoid, and the aerial assault against Iran has created a split within the Republican Party.
The war loomed over the CPAC gathering from start to finish. Some of the attendees wore hats sporting the acronym MIGA, “Make Iran Great Again.” In an opening address, the evangelist Franklin Graham mentioned a news article he’d seen about the war posing problems for Trump’s political base.
“I’m part of that base,” Graham said. “Nobody asked me about it. I don’t have a problem.”
Affection for Trump seemed undimmed, war or no war.
“I will back Trump until the day they put him in the ground,” Douglas Hoyt, 55, of West Virginia, said in an interview. Sporting a hat that read “Barron Trump, 2044” — a nod to the president’s youngest son — he added that Trump is “the president of my country and I have full faith in his decisions.”
Yet amid the nonstop encomiums to Trump onstage, activists milling in the halls talked openly about their misgivings over the conflict.
One fear is that the war has divided Republicans in ways that could hurt the party’s chances in the midterm congressional elections in November.
Another is that Trump might send American troops into Iran, risking more casualties and reminding voters of unpopular Middle East wars that began in the early 2000s and stretched for years.
Ron Eller, a Republican candidate for the Mississippi congressional seat now held by Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, said that he supports Trump’s attack on Iran but conceded that the subsequent spike in oil prices has produced strains within the party.
“A lot of it is economically driven,” said Eller, also wearing a Stetson hat. “I filled up my truck the other day and it was $120. And it wasn’t even an empty tank.”
War-driven gas prices could harm Republicans in the midterm elections, he said, adding, “People vote with their wallet.”
“Hopefully, that will be fixed and out of the way,” he said. “The sooner we have stability, the better. The sooner we can open up the [Hormuz] Strait, the better.”
A bitter memory from past Middle East conflicts is that presidents deployed troops in an exhausting and bloody effort to install friendly leaders. Part of Trump’s appeal to voters is that he vowed to put "America first" and avoid extended overseas wars.
During his first term, he likened George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 to “throwing a big fat brick into a hornet’s nest.”
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%.”
Dean Cain, who starred as Superman in the 1990s television series “Lois & Clark,” made a point that Trump supporters repeated throughout the conference: Trump didn’t start the war; Iran did.
Invoking the rise of the Islamic regime in 1979, Cain said in an interview, “They’ve declared war on us for the last 47 years.”
“Listen, nobody wants boots on the ground, but they are going to do what’s necessary to end this threat,” he added of the administration.
Activists who support the war staged demonstrations. They waved the Lion and Sun flags that preceded the Islamic regime’s takeover of Iran and led chants in Farsi praising the old monarchy.
Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah, was one of the speakers on Saturday, the final day of the conference. Pahlavi, who is living in the U.S., said he is prepared to lead a transition to a democratic, pro-American government in Iran.
“Stay the course,” he told the crowd. “Do not throw this crumbling regime a lifeline. Pave the way for the Iranian people to finish the job.”
The question is, how long will that take and will the American public remain patient?
Angela Paxton, a Republican state senator in Texas, said that when she filled up her truck last time it cost about $70 — normally, the price is in the $50s or low $60s, she said.
“Listen, in Texas we don’t like high gas prices, do we?” she said in an interview. Paxton last year filed for divorce against her husband, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is running for the U.S. Senate seat now held by fellow Republican John Cornyn.
“Most people can tolerate something for a short period of time,” she said, “when they feel like this is not forever and is for a higher purpose. As long as that is how it is perceived, then I think people will stay in a supportive posture” toward the war.
