The Coalition Car Is on a Crash Course

J udging by the email lists and the patterns on X, the American right is going through its now semiannual purge frenzy, when people who felt slighted by the political success of Donald Trump and other Republican factions aligned with him now cynically pretend that they were always Trump’s biggest supporters. They pretend Trump had always promised to embroil the U.S. in an open-ended conflict in Iran, and anyone who doubts it is a wrecker or a saboteur and will be swiftly left in the political dustbin forever. I mean, if we know anything about Trump, it’s that Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro and all the pro-war guys at the American Enterprise Institute always constituted his core base.

You can tell it’s a healthy exercise because when one of the dastardly wreckers does resign — as Joe Kent did yesterday from his counterterrorism position — his opponents and critics don’t celebrate, but somehow become even angrier.

We went through this exact rigamarole nine months ago, during the bombing of Fordow. All the Iraq War skeptics or other naysayers from years ago were being discredited — re-discredited — forever, we were told. The isolationists and restrainers and prioritizers have been “completely obliterated,” just like the Iranian nuclear program. Never to return, except nine months later, they’re still being treated as an imminent threat.

And it’s not just a handful of appointees in various parts of the Pentagon or the security state. According to a new poll from Quinnipiac, fully one-quarter of Republicans think the president hasn’t provided a clear explanation for the war. And roughly the same percentage don’t think Iran posed an imminent threat. That’s why the military action in Iran is broadly unpopular. Fifty-seven percent of the electorate disapproves of the president’s foreign policy, the one that is being hailed by the conservative movement as an undeniable success only just as it’s begun.

Only 37 percent of Republicans support ground troops into Iran. Only 3 percent of Democrats do, along with 19 percent of independents. That would seem like a hard cap of popular opinion on the very military options that make regime change possible. And it may be a line that the president tests, soon. An expeditionary force of 2,500 Marines is being sent to Iran as I write. Just as Republican lawmakers argued last week that Iran was making 47 years of war on us, but we weren’t making war on them, they’ve begun arguing that 2,500 Marines on Kargh Island doesn’t amount to boots on the ground. The administration’s Iran policy is backed with the confidence of a Republican Congress telling the public, “Don’t believe your lying eyes.”

It’s always been obvious that some would rather triumph in a failing coalition, doomed to the electoral wasteland, than share a successful one. But I have to say, I always thought the people who wanted a potential regime-change non-war with Iran were smarter than to hitch themselves to a policy that was unpopular before it even started, and whose implications and consequences can only be guessed at for now.

All the indications are that the coalition car is on a crash course, so I’m glad someone else is ready to take the wheel, announce himself as the driver, and kick me and my friends out the side door, before launching it directly over the cliff ahead, Thelma & Louise style. Maybe they never cared about this coalition and its causes anyway.

They’ve loudly identified who’s going to be left over to pick up the pieces afterward.