March 16, 2026 11:19 AM UTC

Gabe Evans Cheerleads Relentlessly While Iran War Deteriorates

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• by: Colorado Pols

It’s day 16 of the war on Iran, launched after President Donald Trump decided in his infinite wisdom that negotiations with that country over its nuclear weapons program weren’t going well enough to deserve the “President of Peace” treatment, initially with the stated goal of regime change but now unclear as the Iranian regime shows no signs of toppling. Although the air war carried out by America and Israel has succeeded in destroying large quantities of Iranian war materiel, Iran continues to launch retaliatory strikes across the region, and has succeeded in largely halting shipping traffic through the all-important Strait of Hormuz despite false promises last week by Colorado’s own U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright that ships were already being escorted through the passage through which 20% of the world’s oil flows.

As NBC News reports, Trump’s demand that allies who receive oil shipped through the Strait of Hormuz send military forces to protect tankers from Iranian attacks has been politely declined:

“This is not our war, we have not started it,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told reporters Monday.

That appeared to sum up the mood among U.S. allies, with leaders from Berlin to London expressing reservations about Trump’s demands and indicating they had no immediate plans to provide military support to reopen the crucial waterway…

Trump called upon “countries of the world that receive oil through the Hormuz Strait” to “take care of that passage,” as he put it in a Sunday post on Truth Social. In an interview with the Financial Times the same day he went further, warning that NATO would have a “very bad future” if its members did not help free up the strait.

It’s increasingly clear that Trump launched his war on Iran without adequate consideration for protecting the flow of oil from the region that the global economy depends on, and has no real plan for easing the pain consumers are feeling at the pump. Rather than join the U.S. in our military “excursion,” allies are calling for an immediate end to the war as the solution to the budding global oil supply crisis. As the stated objective of the war continues to shift, the official estimate for how long the war will go on continue to suggest the war is several weeks away from ending–a timeline that apparently hasn’t progressed since the war began despite Trump’s insistence that the operation is “ahead of schedule.”

Here in Colorado, as we have already noted in this space, freshman GOP Rep. Gabe Evans has once again emerged as the Trump administration’s most vocal surrogate, defending the war on Iran with the same vigor he has defended every other grossly unpopular move by the administration since they took office together a year ago. In a guest op-ed in the Colorado Springs Gazette yesterday, Evans argued that Congress gave Trump the authority to go to war on Iran 25 years ago so no oversight is needed today–and promised that despite the lack of concrete goals or a timeline, this would not be a “forever war.” Bookmark that:

Immediate intervention was necessary. Congress has already spoken. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that passed seven days after September 11, 2001, permits military action against entities that supported the 9/11 attacks. Iran has provided material support to Al Qaeda since the 1990s. In March 2026, the House and Senate supported intervention by declining to block military action. Per the War Powers Act, the president briefed bipartisan congressional leaders before strikes began.

This is not a forever war. Having served in Operation Enduring Freedom, the longest war in American history, I know what that looks like. The objectives here are far narrower: destroy Iran’s nuclear weapon capability, dismantle its ability to produce and launch missiles and drones, and neutralize its navy so it cannot mine the Straits of Hormuz and cripple 20% of the world’s oil supply.

Regime change is not the mission…

This morning, Evans was on Fox News radio saying once again that high gas prices are the necessary price of stopping Iran, and the solution is more drill baby drilling at home:

EVANS: So you think it’s bad now? They cannot be allowed to possess a nuclear weapon or build their conventional forces, because that’s orders of magnitude worse. That’s the first thought. The second thought is, and this is why we need to produce more American energy. The president talked about it. His administration is heavily focused on it. I sit on the Energy and Commerce Committee. I represent a congressional district that produces 4% of US crude oil. When we produce more of that here in the United States, we insulate ourselves from the shocks of that international energy market by making sure that we’re able to produce what we need here at home and we have that energy independence.

It was Trump who abandoned the international agreement brokered with Iran to prevent their development of a nuclear weapon, and it was Trump who decided the negotiations this year on the subject weren’t bearing fruit. The U.S. was already producing record amounts of oil before Trump and Evans took office. Once again just as he did with Trump’s ill-fated tariffs and mass deportation campaign, we have Gabe Evans putting his own credibility on the line to excuse Trump’s arbitrary decisions and the resulting pain for Americans. But unlike the obvious goal of mass deportations producing a whiter America, Evans can’t articulate an end goal for Trump’s war on Iran when Trump himself doesn’t have one.

Last week, Trump broadcast his fundamental cluelessness by bragging about America “making lots of money” on skyrocketing oil prices, after a year of Trump and Republicans like Evans celebrating a decline in prices at the pump. Gabe Evans’ continued attempts to put a rational face on Trump’s erratic decisions leave him totally exposed to the wrath of voters expected to punish Republicans at all levels in a referendum on Trump this November.

The worse this latest debacle from the “President of Peace” gets, the more politically inexplicable Evans’ canine loyalty becomes.