Welcome to Washington Secrets, your guide to who is taking a beating and who is getting beaten. Today we take you to the fairways of West Palm Beach and Lindsey Graham’s latest pitch for tougher action on Iran, and to the Capitol Hill Club where Republicans were plotting last night how to navigate the midterm elections without losing the Senate …
Sen. Lindsey Graham’s message to President Donald Trump was clear: The president has a “generational opportunity” to reshape the Middle East by toppling Iran’s leaders.
The South Carolina senator used one of his regular rounds of golf earlier this month to make one of his regular arguments, Secrets can reveal, that it was time to take on the mullahs.
But this time it came against a ticking clock and a buildup of American forces in the Middle East.
And he tweaked his message to lean into one of the president’s current obsessions — his legacy.
They played 18 holes at the president’s West Palm Beach club nearly two weeks ago. Less than a week later, Trump announced he was deploying a second aircraft carrier group to the region, expanding his options for strikes on Iran.
A former administration official said Graham’s golf course pitch described a limited amount of time for action.
“The message is that this is a generational opportunity to transform the Middle East, a transformational opportunity,” he said.
“Iran has never in its 47 years experienced this kind of economic collapse, political collapse, environmental collapse, military collapse, and has no internal legitimacy, with massive infighting.”
While Trump weighs his options, mindful that any intervention will attract the anger of Steve Bannon and others on the ultrapopulist wing of his movement, Graham is lobbying for regime change.
He is uniquely placed for that conversation. Graham is one of the best-known Republican Iran hawks and has earned a position where he can disagree with the president and still be invited to the golf course where Trump plays during winter weekends.
He has made similar arguments in public. This week, during a visit to Israel, Graham warned that leaving the Tehran leadership in place risked one of Trump’s pet projects — the Abraham Accords, which have rebuilt relations between Israel and a string of Arab nations.
“If after all this, [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei is still standing, then I think the Abraham Accords will eventually fall, and Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis will get stronger,” he said.
In private, Secrets has also learned that Graham has been lobbying Senate colleagues, trying to find political cover for Trump.
“Iran is not just a strong national security concern,” said a source familiar with the conversations, “It’s also something that, according to Lindsey, motivates voters, in terms of America looking strong in the world.”
In the meantime, Iranian negotiators met with Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, in Geneva on Tuesday for their second round of talks. A third round is expected within two weeks.
But anything could happen.
Last week, Trump announced that the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, was on its way to the Middle East. The USS Abraham Lincoln, with her guided-missile destroyers, has been there for two weeks.
Simone Ledeen, who served in the Pentagon during Trump 1.0, said she believed the President had made up his mind.
“My personal view is that he has decided that he’s going to do it, and part of the calculus is making sure that we have sufficient forces in the region for an expected retaliatory strike by Iran or Iranian proxies,” she said.
Israel has also restocked its Iron Dome defenses and activated a new anti-drone laser, she added.
The White House and Graham’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
It leaves the clock keeps ticking toward a confrontation that would be much broader than last year’s 12-day Iran-Israel conflict and more sustained than the one-night of U.S. strikes on nuclear targets.
The former administration official said Graham’s message was that there was no time to delay while there was a convergence of American strength and Iranian vulnerability.
“There’s sort of this narrow window where the opposition is poised to take the streets and is willing to take large blows for their freedom,” they said.
After their round, Graham posted a picture of himself with the President and Sen Eric Schmitt of Missouri, who joined them for the round. He captioned the image: “Very good golfer, a better President. Reagan Plus.”
Susie Wiles fires the starting gun
Susie Wiles, White House chief of staff, headlined a midterm strategy meeting at the Capitol Hill Club on Tuesday evening, bringing together top Trump officials and campaign strategists to plot a course to November’s elections.
Scott Bessent, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Sean Duffy were among the Cabinet members present, an attendee told Secrets. James Blair, the White House Deputy chief of staff who is running the administration’s midterm strategy, also delivered a presentation.
It mirrored a recent Palm Beach meeting with senators, with the same message to work with the White House and surrogates to lean into gains made on affordability and to identify key districts where resources should be targeted.
Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s pollster, delivered a presentation on voter demographics and the issues that will swing the results. The border is yesterday’s news, and instead, the economy will be the crucial issue. And he repeated his Palm Beach retreat message that podcasts are more useful than making conventional national media appearances
Mark Halperin offered more detail on his Wide World of News column, saying Fabrizio declared six House races to target and seven key Senate races. The only way Republicans would lose the Senate majority was if Democrats took 50 House seats, he reported. (He also had the crucial detail that dinner was a chicken and steak buffet.)
The takeaway from the night was that whichever party holds the White House always takes a shellacking, but that there was plenty more still in play.
Witkoff and son-in-law
The New York Times has a nice nugget in its analysis of Trump’s top negotiating team about how Russian and Iranian officials have come up with nicknames for Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Well, Kushner at least.
“Some Russians have taken to calling the duo ‘Witkoff and Zyatkoff,’ because ‘zyat’ is Russian for son-in-law. The Iranians also have a nickname for Mr. Kushner, using the Persian word for son-in-law: Damad Trump, again defining Mr. Kushner’s influence by virtue of his marriage to the president’s daughter, Ivanka.”
Lunchtime Reading
AOC’s Munich gaffes reveal possible 2028 challenges: “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) international debut at the Munich Security Conference was supposed to showcase her readiness for a possible 2028 bid for Senate or the White House. Instead, it exposed foreign policy missteps that sparked mockery and renewed questions about whether the progressive firebrand is ready for prime time.”
Elon Musk’s whims now decide life or death on Ukraine’s front line: “In the past, only states have been able to change the tide of battle by jamming signals or providing – or withholding – satellite communication coverage. Now the world’s richest man has shown that he can do exactly that, reflecting the reality that if Musk were a country, his net worth of about $850bn would make him the 23rd biggest economy on earth, with a larger GDP than Israel, Sweden or the United Arab Emirates.”
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