Tehran Gloats As Republicans Take A Beating

Voters dealt a resounding blow to President Donald Trump's Republican Party on Tuesday night. Tehran took a victory lap.

“Conscience or the cost of living, Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message,” Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf wrote on X as the votes rolled in.

Ghalibaf, who has played a prominent role in negotiations to end the monthslong war, also threatened retaliation if Washington resumes all-out war, writing that “if the US govt betrays their public will to serve international paymasters and blackmailers, it will learn our NO comes with a Nightmare.”

Tehran has been anxiously awaiting the results of Tuesday’s midterms for weeks. Iranian negotiators reportedly even stalled recent talks in an effort to keep gas prices high and stoke voter frustration with the Trump administration over affordability.

Iranian state media had a field day as Democrats flipped both the Senate and the House, en route to a historic wave not seen in decades.

“War on Iran Emerges As Major Factor in Republicans’ Midterm Defeat,” declared one headline from Tasnim News Agency, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

State-run IRNA led its page with a headline announcing “heavy defeat for Trump and his supporters,” which claimed “an unprecedented level of dissatisfaction with US President Donald Trump” — owed in large part to the war.

Anti-war advocates in Washington were also quick to declare Tuesday’s vote a win for Tehran.

“The Democrats didn't win the midterms,” Trita Parsi, co-founder of the anti-interventionist Quincy Institute, wrote on social media. “Iran did.”

But any perceived victory for Iran isn’t guaranteed to last long.

Although President Donald Trump repeatedly vowed not to resume an all-out assault on Iran before midterms, he made no such promises for after Tuesday’s vote and even floated that he would “finish the job.”

And while the president acknowledged that the conflict was at least in part to blame for Democrats’ sweep, he still insisted to POLITICO late Tuesday that the decision to wage war against Tehran was “an absolutely correct one.”