Republican Rep Ties Himself in Knots Defending Trump’s Iran Strike
Republicans are bending over backward to justify Donald Trump’s attack on Iran.
Speaking with Fox Business on Monday, North Carolina Representative Pat Harrigan tried to explain away U.S. involvement in the Middle East conflict by claiming that the Trump administration was promoting peace through war.
“We’re trying to lower the temperature of global conflict while simultaneously kind of raising it here in order to lower it,” Harrigan said, agreeing with Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Iran should not retaliate. “It would be Iran’s worst decision … to come back and attack American troops.”
Rep. Pat Harrigan: "We're trying to lower the temperature of global conflict while simultaneously kind of raising it here in order to lower it." pic.twitter.com/n1p9uR3PlQ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 23, 2025
By Monday afternoon, Iran had launched six missiles at U.S. bases in Qatar, reported Reuters.
Despite its previous attestations against sending the U.S. to war, it is not clear when Republican leadership will align the party consensus with national opinion and condemn U.S. involvement in Iran.
Trump enjoyed widespread Republican support on the 2024 campaign trail due to an apparently false belief that the MAGA leader would not pursue war—but some of that support is beginning to wane, forging yet another rift in the conservative party.
Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie is one of a handful of Republicans to recently turn on the president while Trump fanned the flames of combat between Israel and Iran.
“Let’s not pretend any President has authority to engage in a war without a vote and without funding from Congress. The Constitution requires we vote,” Massie wrote on X Friday.
Massie also chastized House Speaker Mike Johnson for practically handing over Congress’s sole authority to declare war to the White House, questioning online why the leading Republican lawmaker did not “call us back from vacation to vote on military action if there was a serious threat to our country.”
But the president has already turned his extraordinarily well-funded political machine against his naysayers. By Sunday, Trump and his allies had formed a super PAC aimed at kicking Massie out of national politics for good.