While restrainers may not have won the debate about strikes on Iran, the president is still operating under the restraints of public opinion.
While restrainers may not have won the debate about strikes on Iran, the president is still operating under the restraints of public opinion.
D id you know that President Trump’s most die-hard supporters support President Trump? Well, many people are suddenly reminding you of this fact. Including the president himself. It’s being treated as a great embarrassing truth for anyone who supported Trump because he criticized the Iraq War and promised not to embroil Americans in long, useless conflicts. At UnHerd, anti-war journalist Michael Tracey says MAGA was never anti-war. Politico reports that Trump voters are compromising their previously stated principles to support their leader. The foreign press wonders if the anti-interventionist pose wasn’t just “mood music” that ended when Trump changed the tune.
For some commentators, it’s a chance to say that Trumpism, the political movement, never had any substance beyond Trump himself. For others, it’s just opportunistic taunting. Trump was always a neoconservative, and Trumpism was always about advancing the foreign policy being bellowed by Mark Levin. Either way, critics of America’s foreign adventurism never mattered.
This is wish-casting and gaslighting. It’s likely to come to disappointment very soon.
It was neoconservatives and the hawkish Republican establishment that opposed Trump’s ascent and his reelection primarily on foreign policy grounds. In 2024, that’s why Nikki Haley became the alternative; she was seen as more hawkish in general and on Russia in particular. Back in 2023, the New York Times-Siena poll was showing that MAGA Republicans were distinguished by their foreign policy split from hawks, who supported more aid to Ukraine.
Josh Hammer has dismissed anti–Iran war “podcasters” as irrelevant because polls show they “do not actually speak for the MAGA base.” This seems shockingly cavalier, considering that a huge portion of the top-ten podcasters in the country were once sympathetic to Trump and provided their enormous platforms for him and JD Vance ahead of the 2024 elections and have become critical of the war. Joe Rogan, Andrew Schulz, Shawn Ryan, Theo Von, Megyn Kelly, and Tucker Carlson speak to millions of people. Of course it’s not true that Hammer really thinks they are irrelevant. If he did, there would be no reason to call upon Trump to cast out the “internal anti-MAGA sabotage” and “clean house.” The very fact that anti–Iran war voices are internal to the administration is testimony to the obvious fact that Trump campaigned as a peace candidate and welcomed the support of more dovish people in his party.
The problem is with MAGA Republican as a polling category. It identifies voters who currently tell pollsters they primarily support Donald Trump, not the Republican Party, rather than that they primarily support the Republican Party and then Donald Trump. This is an entirely self-reported category and can’t be properly weighted. It’s not a voter history or ethnography. The population of MAGA Republicans is likely to shift with his policy emphasis. It defines the base as a moving target. When you start to look into cross tabs and identify the actual demographic groups from which Trump draws strength, such as whites with no college degree, you see support for Trump weakening over the Iran war. As with all polling, what matters is how you word things. If you define the politics by the man, you select for personal loyalty. If you define it by the ideology — national populism — you get people to report their political identity in those terms.
The fact is that while restrainers may not have won the debate about launching strikes on Iran, the president is still operating under the restraints of public opinion. An AP-NORC survey found that only 20 percent of Republicans favor sending U.S. ground troops to fight in Iran. That’s consistent with an NBC/Quinnipiac poll showing that a majority of the broader GOP base opposes ground forces. A poll from the Quincy Institute/American Conservative found that 79 percent of Trump voters say they want Trump to “declare victory and get out” now, with nearly 60 percent saying they would oppose ground troops.
Many advocates of Trump’s Iran policy are saying, “Finish the job” — by which they mean remove the regime from power. Or that President Trump should “not make the same mistake” of ending the war too soon. Or, my favorite: a Wall Street Journal opinion piece saying that Trump must accept the burden of regime change in Iran, as “condign punishment” for once fooling Americans into believing we could do otherwise.
I can predict few things with accuracy. But those expecting President Trump to do penance by prosecuting a broadly unpopular policy, to expiate his guilt even as the markets are urging him to declare victory, are sure to be disappointed. And once again, we’ll find that it’s not “the restrainers” who are crying, but those whose ambitions were restrained by the good sense of American public opinion.