Lara Trump acknowledged that President Donald Trump’s war with Iran “could cost” Republicans the midterm elections, but she warned that control of Congress “doesn’t matter” if Tehran obtains a nuclear weapon.
The president’s daughter-in-law and former Republican National Committee co-chair offered the strikingly candid assessment during an interview with British journalist Harry Cole, editor-at-large for The Sun, on his show “Harry Cole Saves the West.”
Turning to the Iran conflict, Cole suggested the timing could hardly have been worse for the president politically.
“The timing couldn’t have been worse for this conflict, really. I mean, from a political point of view, it could cost him his legacy,” Cole said.
Lara Trump pushed back on the idea that the president’s legacy was at stake, but she didn’t sugarcoat the political risks.
“Well, it could cost him these midterms,” she replied. “I think Donald Trump’s legacy has yet to be written. And I think that, in a lot of ways, maybe, I still say he’s going to go down in history as one of the greatest presidents, if not the greatest America has ever seen. But you’re right.”
She stressed that the remaining two years of the president’s term are critical to continuing what she described as major progress both at home and abroad.
“The last two years really matter. There’s been so much positive movement and forward progress for America and for America on the world stage, America here at home in his, you know, first two years of this second term. And he wants to see that continue,” she said.
Lara Trump also revealed that the president “really hates the way that things have gone with Iran” and had hoped events would have unfolded more quickly.
She accused the Iranian regime of deliberately dragging things out to hurt the president politically.
“The Iranians are absolutely holding out until these midterm elections,” she said. “They want to do everything they can to damage this president’s hopes of these midterms going his way because they think it’s going to give them an advantage. This is a rogue regime. These people are absolute lunatics over there. They’re very hard to deal with.”
Still, she credited the president with reshaping alliances across the region.
“But I don’t think anyone would have been able to do what this president has done in the Middle East overall, where now you have a conglomerate of countries who are now basically full-blown allies of the United States. When had we ever been able to say that before other than Israel?” she said.
Cole later asked whether, in the president’s mind, losing both the House and Senate would be a price worth paying to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
“Yeah,” Lara Trump responded. “Look, I think he just understands that when Iran gets a nuclear weapon, it doesn’t matter who is in charge of the House. It doesn’t matter the majority in the Senate. This world is a really frightening place, and you really can’t come back from that.”
Her remarks come as the war increasingly collides with Republicans’ midterm campaign. The conflict began in February and has dragged on far longer than the short operation the president initially described. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has also disrupted global oil supplies and driven up fuel prices, leaving voters facing higher costs for everyday necessities.
[READ MORE: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Urges Americans to Vote Against Trump and Republicans in Midterms]
