President Donald Trump turned his Tuesday night rally in Wasilla into a warning aimed at two targets at once: the regime in Tehran, and the election setup in Alaska that has put two men named Dan Sullivan on the same Senate ballot. Speaking at the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center on October 13, the president told the crowd that Iran's escalating attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz will be answered. Reuters has reported that Tehran is deploying new tactics against ships in the strait to keep oil prices high and pressure the United States ahead of the November midterms, citing two senior Iranian officials.
"Wait and see what we do to Iran. We're going to hit them hard. Wait and see what we do to Iran, because we've had enough."
Trump said Iran's nuclear facilities remain buried beneath thousands of tons of rock, and that Tehran had been just two weeks away from a nuclear weapon when its program was struck. "They were the bullies of the Middle East, but they are the bullies of the Middle East no longer," he said, vowing the war will end very soon and prices will come tumbling down. It was the sharpest of a series of shifting signals: the president had indicated days earlier that he would not launch further strikes before the midterms, then warned at an October 9 rally in New York that he could "finish it off" if Iran failed to reach a deal.
The Alaska half of the speech was about the race that brought him 45 miles north of Anchorage. Sen. Dan Sullivan, seeking a third term against former Democratic congresswoman Mary Peltola, shares the November ballot with retired teacher Dan J. Sullivan — a same-name candidacy produced under Alaska's system, where a top-four open primary feeds a ranked-choice general election. Trump attacked ranked-choice voting as a scam built for exactly this kind of confusion. "They found a guy named Dan Sullivan, they put him up to get things a little confused," he said, noting the namesake drew 2.4 percent in an earlier count — a slice big enough to decide a tight race. Sen. Sullivan has accused Chuck Schumer's operation of hand-recruiting Peltola and trying to deceive Alaska voters; the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has denied knowledge of any coordinated effort, and Dan J. Sullivan denies he is a sham candidate.
Trump left no doubt about his own instruction to the crowd: vote for the real Dan Sullivan. "In less than two years, Sen. Sullivan and I have delivered more for Alaska than any senator and any president," he said during the 90-minute appearance at the full 3,500-seat arena, in a town that gave him more than 75 percent of its vote in 2024. The stakes explain the trip: Republicans are defending the Senate on November 3, Democrats need four seats to take it, and Alaska — which has not backed a Democrat for Senate in nearly 20 years — has become close enough that the president flew eight hours to defend it in person. While much of the media skips past it, Trump used the Wasilla stage to call out both the live threat abroad and the election setup at home that could flip the Senate.
Never miss a story.
Join our Telegram channel and get every article link the second it’s published.
Join Telegram Channel