President Donald Trump alluded to the likelihood that the Iran war will resume in earnest after next week’s midterm elections.
“You’ll see Iran in a couple of weeks, if you don’t mind,” Trump told a crowd on Tuesday during a rally in Lubbock, Texas.
Trump has used the campaign trail to defend the Iran war, contending Tehran’s regime cannot have a nuclear weapon.
At the same time, he has argued that gas prices, a midterm election pressure point, will drop precipitously once the war has ended, announcing on Tuesday he is terminating former President Joe Biden‘s “expensive and unnecessary methane regulations to save consumers and energy producers.”
Trump was accompanied to Texas by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a rare campaign appearance from the country’s top diplomat to coincide with the arrival of an oil tanker carrying 1 million barrels of heavy Venezuelan crude oil, part of a bilateral energy agreement reached after the United States captured deposed leader Nicolas Maduro.
“Our enemies are weaker, our country is stronger, and our people are safer because Donald J. Trump is the president of the United States,” Rubio said after also addressing an earlier rally in Corpus Christi.
Trump is in Texas to campaign for the state’s Republican Senate nominee, Ken Paxton, whom the president endorsed over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and who, on average, is at a disadvantage against his Democratic opponent James Talarico in the polls.
Talarico organized a competing event in Lubbock at the same time as Trump’s rally.
Trump, who has raised eyebrows in recent weeks for repeatedly talking about Republicans’ bodies, particularly that of Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH), told the crowd he was not sure he could do the same for Paxton.
“But I made the mistake of studying his anatomy and explaining it to the audience, and the audience loved it,” he said. “By the way, he went up 12 points that day. He went from being down to being up. Maybe I should do that with Ken Paxton, but I’m not sure your body is going to qualify.”
Trump, too, used the rally to heap praise on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has returned to the president’s good graces after their acrimonious 2016 Republican presidential primary campaigns.
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“I would pick Ted Cruz to be the next Supreme Court justice,” he said.
One week before Election Day, Talarico has a 2.5-percentage-point edge over Paxton, so the race is within the margin of error, according to RealClearPolitics.