Iran’s leaders say midterm results show voters have rejected Trump’s war

Iranians on Wednesday struck a defiant tone, celebrating U.S. voters’ rebuke of President Donald Trump in the midterm elections while many in the Middle East waited to see how the results could affect the Iran war.

Concerns about the war, particularly frustration over rising prices for fuel and other goods in the U.S., helped Democrats win control of both chambers of Congress in Tuesday’s vote, a sharp setback for Trump and his Republican Party.

But Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, whose father and predecessor was killed in the opening strikes of the war in February, dismissed the prospect of any major change in the U.S. approach to the Islamic Republic.

“If there are still those who harbor even a slight hope for a change in behavior or partisan and factional shifts within the system of domination, or who imagine that by giving concessions to America they can dissuade it from hostility toward the Iranian nation, they are gravely mistaken,” he said on his social media account.