Trump’s uniquely unpopular war on Iran
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You almost couldn’t design a more unpopular war. Not only do very few Americans support President Donald Trump’s attacks on Iran last weekend, but our chief ally in the ongoing conflict, Israel, also faces its lowest favorability in the U.S. in decades.
Just 39% of Americans support Trump’s latest attacks on Iran, according to an average of 12 nonpartisan polls that Daily Kos collected as of Thursday. An average of 50% oppose the attacks, and 16% are unsure. (Those do not total 100% due to not all polls containing all response options.)
And there is reason to believe that support for the war is closer to its ceiling than its floor. A CNN/SSRS survey did not allow respondents to choose “unsure” as an option, and when forced to pick a side, 41% of Americans support the strikes, making for only a 1-percentage-point improvement from the average. Meanwhile, 59% oppose them—a 9-point jump over the average.
Historically, wars tend to begin with much higher levels of support. Just days after the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003, Gallup found that 75% of Americans supported sending in troops. The same was true of the Afghanistan War (89% support in November 2001) and the Vietnam War (61% support in September 1965).
But as those wars dragged on and their financial burdens mounted alongside their casualties, domestic support dropped away. Just five years after the invasion of Iraq, Gallup recorded that 63% of Americans thought sending troops was a mistake. Even the Afghanistan War, started in response to the nation’s worst terrorist attack, hit net-negative support shortly before its end in 2021, after nearly 20 years of fighting.
Fear of starting a “forever war,” like the ones Trump campaigned against in 2024, has driven his administration to downplay how long the war on Iran might last.
“Four to five weeks,” Trump told The New York Times on Monday.
But most of the public isn’t buying that timetable. Just 25% of Americans think the war will be over in a matter of days or weeks, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll. That’s roughly the same share that thinks the U.S. will be embroiled in Trump’s Iran war for years (22%). Even the fact that 1 in 4 Americans say they’re “not sure” how long it will go on expresses pessimism about the campaign.
“We are just getting started,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Wednesday, as if that was what the American public wanted to hear.
Trump has refused to rule out deploying ground troops to Iran, but if he did that, public opinion would likely sour even further. Just 24% of Americans support a hypothetical troop deployment, while 58% oppose it, a survey from the Angus Reid Institute found.
At the same time, it is easy to imagine Trump claiming premature victory in the near future, only for the conflict to carry on or metastasize, much like former President George W. Bush’s boast of “Mission Accomplished” just six weeks after the U.S. invaded Iraq. The war lasted for another 450.
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For his part, Trump does appear concerned with the public’s dour view of his new war.
“I think that the polling is very good, but I don’t care about polling. … I don’t think the polling is low,” he told the New York Post on Monday. “Look, whether polling is low or not, I think the polling is probably fine. But it’s not a question of polling. You cannot let Iran, who’s a nation that has been run by crazy people, have a nuclear weapon.”
There are numerous reasons for the public’s skeptical view of the war. Beyond Trump’s lies and exaggerations, there was no inciting attack on American soil, unlike with Afghanistan and 9/11. The deceptive claims of Iran’s nuclear capabilities are reminiscent of the false claims that Bush made about Iraq’s capabilities before invading. Even major media outlets, often hungry for war, met Trump’s claims with immediate skepticism. After all, Trump himself tore up the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, allowing the nation to seek development of a weapon.
Furthermore, the Trump administration’s logic behind the initial attacks is, at best, incoherent.
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Israel had been planning to attack Iran and that the U.S. hadn’t been able to talk them out of it, despite the fact that we fund, arm, and help defend the nation. If the U.S. didn’t aid Israel’s attack, we would “suffer higher casualties” than if we hadn’t joined in, Rubio claimed.
However, according to The New York Times, Trump was actually dissuaded from diplomacy and persuaded toward war by far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long sought to topple the Iranian regime. (Another echo of Iraq: In 2002, Netanyahu told Congress, “If you take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”)
And yet Trump clearly felt belittled by that reporting. On Tuesday, the day after Rubio’s remarks, the president told the media that the war was all his idea, saying, “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand, but Israel was ready and we were ready.”
Whoever’s idea it was to attack Iran, and whatever Trump’s motive behind it, the fact of Israel’s major involvement is likely another drag on the administration’s ability to sell the war to the American public.
Americans’ views of Israel have fallen sharply since its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, where the nation has killed more than 72,000 people, including over 21,000 children, according to local health authorities. As a result, a new Gallup poll finds that only 46% of Americans have a favorable view of Israel—its worst rating since 1989. In fact, for the first time in the firm’s polling, Americans’ sympathies are more with the Palestinians than the Israelis in that conflict.
The Iran war has already presented brutalities familiar to Israel’s siege of Gaza—except this time with more direct U.S. involvement. Already, more than 1,000 civilians are estimated to have died in Iran, according to the U.S.-based group Human Rights Activists in Iran.
And a great many of those deaths are especially tragic, like the dozens of 7- to 12-year-old girls killed at a school in Minab, Iran. Israeli bombs also reportedly struck a hospital in Tehran. Either of those strikes, if proven to be intentional, would constitute a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.
There are obvious and legitimate reasons to want new leadership in Iran, whose dictatorship has viciously repressed its people and fueled proxy wars and terror campaigns throughout the Middle East. But such wanton destruction and civilian slaughter from the U.S. and Israel will not persuade the American public that this is a moral mission with a cost worth paying for—either with dollars or human lives.
Any updates?
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Vibe check
In the U.S., there is infinite money for war and none for our schools. It’s no wonder that only 28% of K-12 teachers report living comfortably on their current household income, according to a new Gallup poll. Meanwhile, the majority (52%) say they’re just getting by, and 21% are outright struggling.
However, whatever comfort they may have is unlikely to come from their teaching salaries alone. One in three teachers also works a non-teaching-related job. Another 62% work an additional teaching-related job, such as coaching sports or leading afterschool activities. And 85% of teachers with a second gig work that job at least partially during the school year.
Anyway, on an unrelated note, did you know a single Tomahawk cruise missile costs roughly $2.2 million? The U.S. appears to have already fired off a few dozen at Iran.
Saint James Talarico (he/him)
David Harsanyi, Washington Examinerمصدر …
