L H Brok retweeted
We have a great military and several thousand nuclear weapons, but all an enemy needs to do to bring us to our knees is raise gas prices by a dollar. Unless we change that equation, we have no future.
I keep hearing the New Right people say that if the war in Iran had only lasted two weeks or so, the Americans would have accepted it and thought it great. It makes me sad because it's partly true. We couldn't have won WWII with that attitude, no way.
It's a great American weakness not to be able to stomach doing what must be done when what must be done appears on the world stage. It's probably the greatest poison to our country.
L H Brok retweeted
Days after election, Rubio delivers strong defense of war in Iran. Contrast with Vance could not be clearer.
L H Brok retweeted
My choice for *Pres/*VP: DeSantis/Haley or Haley/DeSantis. Both: governors; Haley UN Amb.
Also, Haley among GOP candidates has unique appeal to independents and women!
Cruz & Cotton, both excellent, but would be loss to Senate. Rubio, great choice, but loss as Sec/State.
I'm a lifelong INDEPENDENT. Independents make up ca. 46% of US voters.
Nikki Haley has demonstrated in previous runs that she can draw in independents. It's worthwhile seriously considering her in 2028.
cc @Republicans @FoxNews
Could It Happen Here? The Seeds of Anti-Americanism Have Been Planted With Our Youth
By Mark Penn & Andrew Stein
realclearpolitics.com/articl…
L H Brok retweeted
Here’s an article from the New York Times in 1933. To all the Jews who voted for @NYCMayor or @AbdulElSayed or the other avowed Jew haters on the ballot this week, please read the article and think hard about what you have done and how you may be contributing to a repeat of a very dark history.
Top Christian pro-Israel group goes after Vance for ‘dog whistle’ blaming Jews for midterm defeat
CUFI Action Fund said it had ‘already begun our efforts to get this house in order and sweep out the snakes’
jewishinsider.com/2026/11/ch…
L H Brok retweeted
Mr. Vice-President,
Please allow me to present a different perspective.
The problem was not the Iran War. It was the cease fire.
If you start a war, you need to win it and finish it – otherwise don’t start it.
This war should have been over six months ago, with the Strait of Hormuz wide open and oil flowing. The second and third tiers of Iranian leadership should have been destroyed, and we should have supported the pro-western forces who could have taken leadership. We stood on the brink of a new, more peaceful Middle East - and then we blinked. We had a chance not only to deny Iran nuclear weapons, but to get rid of the world’s biggest supporter of terrorism.
Instead, we had a cease fire, which was followed by months of will we or won’t we finish the job. Every day was a different message. There still is. Is the war over? Is it about to begin? No one knows. There is confusion and inconsistency.
In June 2025, America was not involved. This was an Israel vs Iran issue.
No one forced the United States to attack Iran then, or in February of 2026. It was a decision made by President Trump. In my opinion, it was the right decision.
Once the decision was made, we should not have stopped until the regime fell. But instead, you negotiated a cease fire that didn’t last, didn’t work and left us in no man’s land, with higher prices and our troops still deployed.
Our troops could have been home, the Navy returned to its bases, a peaceful regime in place , new alliances forged, and gas prices below $3.00 a gallon.
No, Mr. Vice President. It’s not the war. It’s the so-called cease fire.
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
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. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
L H Brok retweeted
J.D. Vance's take on the GOP midterm debacle is getting some seriously bad notices from some noted conservatives. There was this from @KimStrassel
This is a total hoot.
About the only thing it gets correct is that 2024 Trump voters were "pissed." As the polls spell out, very clearly, they were angry about tariffs--a word weirdly not found in this post, but which exit polls showed 65% of voters dislike. There's a straight line between those punishing costs and Senate losses in Kansas, Iowa, Ohio (farm areas) and beyond.
Angry the WH instead spent this past year talking about ballrooms and the Kennedy center. Frustrated by the complete absence of a next-two-year agenda (85% are concerned by healthcare costs. Where is the GOP plan?)
They are also unhappy about the war, though the numbers might be different if the president been clear about an exit strategy. And not sure where the "smartest" (and most anonymous) pollster in the world got the Israel argument. Exit polls show that of the 51% of voters who said our support for Israel was "too strong," only 19% of even that subset of respondents were Republican. The vast majority of GOP voters said our support for Israel was "just right" or "not strong enough."
Amusing to claim the problem here was traditional conservatives, as they were sidelined. Tillis was run out of the party, dooming NC. As was Cornyn. The WH had a pure expression of its second-term Trump/Vance agenda and loyalty in its chosen candidate of Ken Paxton. That would be the smoking carcass sitting on a 12-point loss in. . . Texas of all places. Meanwhile, who exactly is even talking about "asylum"? That's just a smear-y effort to preemptively shut down valid criticism.
The GOP strength has always been in its coalition--free-marketers, defense hawks, cultural conservatives. Trump's first-term success came from largely following that Reagan playbook. The second-term leaned into me-too progressive populism--at the veep's urging--and it ain't working.
The weird thing is that the veep remains more obsessed with remaking the party than with winning. Winning will require a lot better understanding of what happened yesterday than what is on offer in this alternate-universe view.
L H Brok retweeted
Let’s go through this hypothetical, because it may be the new reality. It’s important because this is exactly what JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, Massie and others are pushing for. This is your “America First” cult so many worship:
If the United States cuts off Israel the way Tucker, Massie, and the rest of that crowd want, the immediate result is a one-sided loss for America. Israel is the single best source of real-time intelligence on Iran, Hezbollah, and the other groups that actually target Americans. That information doesn’t come from satellites alone. It comes from people on the ground, from units that have been fighting these networks for decades, and from technical collection that no other partner matches.
Shut that off and the US either spends far more to try to replace it or simply accepts bigger blind spots on plots aimed at US bases, embassies, and the homeland.
The military side is the same story. Israel has fed the Pentagon combat data on Iranian missiles, drones, tunnel systems, and urban fighting that US forces have used in real operations. That pipeline ends the day the relationship ends. Israel will not stop developing or sharing those lessons. It will just share them with India, with certain Gulf states, or with whoever else is willing to work with it. America loses the feedback. Someone else gains it.
There is no economic upside that matters. The aid is a small line item and most of it buys American equipment. Ending it doesn’t move the federal budget in any noticeable way. What does move is the cost of energy and shipping once Iranian proxies have more room to operate.
Every time those groups have been able to hit tankers or infrastructure, insurance rates and oil prices have risen. Removing the main force that has been degrading them increases the odds of exactly those disruptions. Americans pay that bill at the pump and in the price of goods, not in some abstract foreign-aid column.
Israel will not collapse if the aid stops. It will look for new partners who are reliable, deepen its own strike options against Iran, and keep doing what it has been doing. The party that benefits from the American withdrawal is Iran. It gets a freer hand, fewer early-warning problems for its networks, and a United States that has voluntarily blinded itself in the one region where those networks operate. That’s not a strategic gain for the United States. It’s a transfer of advantage to the regime that has spent forty-five years saying it intends to damage America.
The isolationist argument never explains how that outcome serves any actual American interest. It just asserts that walking away is automatically better. The record doesn’t support the assertion.
L H Brok retweeted
I don’t know why I feel like saying this, and I’ll probably delete it, but I’ll just say it: Gadi Eisenkot seeking to become Israeli prime minister through an alliance with parties that refuse to call Hamas a terrorist organization is a disgrace. It is sickening. It is one of the most shameless things I have heard of in any political campaign, in any country, ever.
L H Brok retweeted
This is why we call it the “Pilot In Command”
This happened in the same vicinity where the ill-fated Lear Jet hit the storm cell.
JetBlue pilot en route from Fort Lauderdale to Austin says to ATC:
“So you're gonna make us go through a, uh, severe thunderstorm?”
The captain then commanded the situation and overrode the ATC:
“So we declare an emergency, making a left turn heading 260 for severe weather avoidance.”
Sometimes piloting demands a specific set of traits - decisiveness, independent judgment, and the backbone to reject an instruction when it doesn’t feel right.
Refusing the assigned heading showed exactly that kind of assertive leadership.
Whoever is pilot monitoring must make these tough calls but ultimately, the captain is the final authority and ultimately accountable for every soul on board.