On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance took to social media to blame Tuesday’s blue wave on the Iran war, the economy, and, for some reason, the United States’ relationship with Israel. Reports soon emerged that his post undercut the White House’s plans for holding the MAGA coalition together after the midterm elections, and that Vance was trying to rally its disaffected voters around himself. To many, it seemed like an act of betrayal by a man who was widely considered to be the heir to the MAGA throne.
But one man took a different approach, and by many measures the better one. Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the Iran war as a necessary action by the Trump administration and stood firmly beside the president after Tuesday’s defeat.
🚨🇺🇸 Rubio just picked the opposite side of Vance on the Iran war: he’s staying, he’s defending it, and he won’t rule out 2028 Two days after the vice president blamed the war for losing the Senate, the secretary of state told the Times the opposite. Gas prices are nothing to brag about, he admitted, but Trump “deserves a tremendous amount of credit” for the war anyway: “That is the price of leadership... the willingness to do things that may not be politically popular.” Rubio also shot down reports he’s leaving, saying he’ll serve to the end of the term, and refused to say whether he’ll run for president: “I literally will not talk about 2028 anymore.” He once said he’d be the first to back a Vance campaign; today he gave Trump the loyalty Vance didn’t, and Trump is the one who decides which of them the party gets. Source: New York Times / Writer: Daniel
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) November 5, 2026
In an interview with The New York Times, the Secretary of State defended the Iran war, offering a sharp contrast to Vance’s finger-pointing.
“Higher prices at the gas pump, I acknowledge, is not like the kind of thing you campaign on and brag about,” Rubio said, but added that President Trump “deserves a tremendous amount of credit” for his actions against Iran.
“Ultimately, that is the price of leadership — is the willingness to do things that may not be politically popular or expedient but are necessary for your country and its long-term future,” he said.
Conservatives have historically defended the harder but morally right path in politics. Free markets, limited government, and expecting people to fend for themselves are not always as politically appealing as government guarantees, expansive entitlements, and welfare. But the more popular promise is not necessarily the better one. The same is true of conservative foreign policy.
Sure, it sounds better to say we should never go to war. But consider Tucker Carlson’s view, that all war is bad and therefore must be avoided, or Matt Walsh’s suggestion that he would rather Iran have a nuclear weapon than the United States become communist. Is this anything we would have heard from Ronald Reagan, or from Franklin Roosevelt during World War II? It should shame our party that, if Hitler were marching across Europe again, so many on the American Right would oppose joining the war against him.
The Iran war was necessary. The last thing we should accept is a regime that sponsors terrorism acquiring a nuclear weapon. If war was necessary to prevent that, then so be it. Being antiwar should mean more than opposing military action when the danger becomes unavoidable. It should also mean rejecting bad deals that leave us facing a worse confrontation down the line. In this view, the confrontation with Iran was the price of Obama’s mistake. Trump’s task now is to make sure we did not repeat it.
This all comes after rumors circulated earlier this week that President Trump was considering firing Marco Rubio, and that Rubio was even considering resigning to launch his 2028 presidential campaign. The secretary of state denied those rumors and said he would continue to stand with the administration.
The Secretary of State also had this to say when asked by The New York Times about his thoughts on 2028: “I literally will not talk about 2028 anymore. I just won’t do it.”