Right-wing cable news host and ex-Republican congressman Matt Gaetz has issued a strong warning against any further escalation of President Donald Trump’s war with Iran, predicting it would have dire consequences for Americans.
Speaking at CPAC in Texas, Gaetz opened his whistle-stop remarks by declaring pointedly: “I come from the wing of the Republican Party that is only loyal to one nation and that is the United States of America.”
A clear rejection of the notion that Israel has the power to dictate the terms of U.S. involvement in the conflict, the speaker ran through a list of topical issues – blaming Democrats for long TSA lines at airports, championing the SAVE Act on voter ID, attacking trans rights, pressuring the Senate – before returning to his principal theme.
“We cannot move into [November’s] midterms with self-inflicted wounds,” Gaetz told the conservative conference. “We have to end this cancel culture that is now occurring on the right.
“Dissent and disagreement has to be allowed. Tucker Carlson isn’t going anywhere. I didn’t bring a list of people to denounce or disclaim and antisemitism isn’t hiding around every corner and in every bush.
“President Trump is a builder. He understands that politics is an exercise in addition not subtraction and division.
“And so while I may not agree with the likes of Mark Levin or Ben Shapiro or Mike Huckabee that we have some sort of near slavish loyalty to a country in a far away land, I would walk across hot coals arm in arm with those individuals to stop the Democrats turning America into a more transsexual version of Venezuela.”
Gaetz, briefly Trump’s first-choice nominee to be attorney general, described a civil disagreement with the president during his first term, when, as a congressman, he voted against granting the president war powers to move against Iran.
“In the end, it was President Trump’s vision that kept us out of a war then and I certainly hope that the Polymarket prediction that says there’s a 71 percent chance that ground troops go into Iran is false,” he continued.
“I want President Trump to have every diplomatic tool at his disposal and I do trust that he knows a great deal more than I do. But a ground invasion of Iran will make our country poorer and less safe. It will mean higher gas prices, higher food prices and I’m not sure we’d end up killing more terrorists than we would create.”
Gaetz concluded his remarks by drawing a parallel with the detested “forever wars” that unfolded in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, joking that Iran had just chosen a “gay ayatollah,” and appealing to conservatives to “stick together” against the left.
This year’s instalment of CPAC is taking place in the Lone Star State at a time when a bad-tempered Senate primary is playing out, pitting establishment GOP incumbent John Cornyn against the MAGA-aligned state AG Ken Paxton, a contest representative of broader tensions on the right.
The conference will feature talks from members of the pro-war camp like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, as well as anti-war voices like Steve Bannon, who, like Gaetz, has warned against the conflict hurting U.S. consumers and costing their party at the polls.
Away from CPAC, disagreement over Operation Epic Fury has seen the likes of broadcaster Megyn Kelly and former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene feud with the aforementioned Levin and influencer Carrie Prejean Boller take to TV to complain that she no longer recognizes Trump and pronounce his political project: “Deader than dead.”
A new poll of registered voters by right-wing Fox News has meanwhile shown the president’s approval rating plummeting amid widespread disapproval of his strikes, its publication coming in the same week that a Democrat won a special election race in deep red Palm Beach County, Florida, in which Trump’s own Mar-a-Lago home is situated.
