Happy Saint Patrick’s Day. On the menu today: The war against Iran is not popular among the American people, and the Trump administration could really use a unified, focused, well-informed, clear, and coherent right-of-center media world making the case for the president’s actions to the public. Instead, they’ve got Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson ranting about conspiracy theories, Laura Loomer saying Tulsi Gabbard’s office is leaking because it’s full of Never-Trumpers, and for some reason Megyn Kelly really wants to talk to you about Mark Levin’s anatomy. Read on.
The Podcasters Are Out to Lunch
As far as I can tell, Candace Owens’s favorite topics to talk about are her allegations of the ever-widening vast global conspiracy that really killed Charlie Kirk, her related nonsense claims of the endless perfidy of his widow Erika, and the bizarre insistence that the first lady of France is secretly a man.
As far as I can tell, Tucker Carlson’s favorite topics are that every country you ever thought was an enemy of the United States, like Russia and Iran, are actually reasonable and misunderstood, they’ve been given a bad rap, and have a long list of legitimate grievances with the U.S.; simultaneously, Carlson alone can pull back the curtain and reveal that Israel and the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic Jewish movement are at the root of every problem in American life.
I don’t know what Megyn Kelly’s favorite topic is, but lately she’s spending an inordinate amount of time discussing the genitalia of Mark Levin.
Laura Loomer contends that “the leaks in the Trump administration” come from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. If a broken clock can be right twice a day, who knows, maybe Loomer is right about this. But she goes on to claim, “In order to be hired to work at ODNI, you have to be an anti-Semite, a Trump hater, a Never Trump, funded by Koch, or a Democrat.” (If you’re working in the Trump administration, can you accurately be labeled “Never Trump”?)
Now, I have more beefs with Gabbard than a Chicago stockyard, but I don’t think any of those labels can accurately be applied to the DNI, who keeps playing the role of a good soldier as the president makes decisions that contradict her past stances. She left the Democratic Party back in 2022. She did have an advisory role to the Koch-funded noninterventionist Center for the Study of Statesmanship at the Catholic University of America; according to her 2019 congressional financial disclosure form, she did not receive any compensation for that position.
If you’re the Trump administration and you’re trying to bolster support for a not-all-that popular war of choice against a longtime enemy of the U.S., you would probably prefer a right-of-center media world that was unified, well-informed, deeply interested in the details of the ongoing war, and eager to make the case for the ongoing military action.
The administration is not going to get that.
It’s a big right-of-center media ecosystem, and the names mentioned above don’t represent all of it. But they do represent a loud chunk of it, and some corners of it have proven quite lucrative. Fortune recently wrote that Owens’s “company generates up to $10 million in revenues per year.” Carlson’s company raised $15 million in 2023, and he and his business partner, Neil Patel, bought out their investors in June.
Back in 2003, the last time the U.S. initiated military attacks against a terrorism-supporting Muslim Middle Eastern country on the Persian Gulf whose name started with “Ira,” the U.S. media environment was dramatically different.
The dearly missed Rush Limbaugh was the undisputed king of talk radio, and the equally missed Charles Krauthammer was enormously influential as both a syndicated columnist and panelist on Fox News. Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly are still around, but they and the Fox News prime-time lineup were much more central to the discussions on the right 23 years ago. Drudge Report was seemingly everybody’s home page. Heck, Andrew Sullivan was influential among those whose worldview had turned hawkish after the 9/11 attacks.
The irony is that back then, there was much less personal loyalty to President George W. Bush in the conservative media world than there is to Trump now. A little more than two years after the Iraq War began, the legal wing of the conservative media world broke out in open revolt over the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. But for better or worse, conservative opponents of the invasion of Iraq were few and far between, and man, did they get blistering opposition from their usual allies.
Things were so different back then that Bill Kristol and Carlson were on the same team at the Weekly Standard. Although I guess both Kristol and Carlson oppose the current war against Iran.
That’s right, longtime Iran hawk Kristol wants U.S. military action against Tehran to halt, while Gabbard, whose 2020 presidential campaign once sold “No War With Iran” T-shirts for $24.99, is being a loyal cabinet official and supporting the war. That is some industrial-strength irony.
The recently retired Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is taking gold in the Strange New Respect Olympics, declaring on CNN that Trump ordering military action against Iran is “a complete betrayal of his campaign promises.” Meanwhile, David Boies, who “represented Al Gore in the legal battles over the 2000 Presidential election, and he was a lead attorney in the case that overturned California’s Proposition 8, which had banned gay marriage in the state,” is telling the New Yorker that Democrats ought to support President Trump in the war against Iran and “make sure he finishes the job.”
Boies, writing in the Wall Street Journal:
Every past president since Bill Clinton, Republican and Democrat alike, has declared that Iran couldn’t be permitted to develop nuclear weapons. Not one acted to prevent it. Every president since Ronald Reagan has condemned Iran’s role in terrorism against American citizens, interests and allies. Not one acted to stop it. Instead, each president left his successor with a more dangerous Iran and a more complicated threat to address.
Last June President Trump undertook a limited military operation designed to interrupt Iran’s development of nuclear weapons and discourage the country from continuing its nuclear program. In the face of Iran’s refusal to forswear nuclear weapons and evidence that it was rapidly increasing the number, sophistication and range of its missiles, Mr. Trump began the current military campaign. . . .
Those of us who generally oppose Mr. Trump but who recognize the threat Iran poses need to support the military action not because we owe anything to Mr. Trump but because we owe it to ourselves, our country and our children.
If we opposed the war and succeeded in pressuring Mr. Trump to curtail it before the mission is accomplished, we would have the satisfaction of defeating someone we generally oppose, which might help ourselves politically. But America would be worse for it.
(Compare how Boies justifies the administration’s actions, with, say, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. No bluster, boasts, or bravado, just a simple recitation of difficult, cold, hard facts.)
This scrambling of the familiar hawk-vs.-dove battle lines is a big reason why some of the loudest voices in the usually Trump-loyalist media world are dissing each other like late-’90s East Coast/West Coast gangster rappers. Everybody’s convinced they’re defending true “Trump-ism” against apostates and heretics.
Back in 2016, Trump indeed campaigned against “forever wars” and denounced the Bushes and the Iraq War, but he also pledged to “bomb the s*** out of ISIS” and said he would have seized Iraq’s oil. Each side of the populist right heard what they wanted to hear back then — the doves believed Trump would bring the troops home and let the world sort out its own problems, while the hawks believed Trump would end nation-building missions, take the troops off the chain, and really punish America’s enemies when they stepped out of line. So far, Trump has been mostly Jacksonian; he isn’t afraid to use lethal military force and often uses it in overwhelming numbers, but the missions rarely last too long — the strike that killed Iran’s Qasem Soleimani, the raid on ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the airstrikes on the Iranian nuclear program, and the Venezuela mission that captured Nicolás Maduro.
It’s not surprising that some MAGA loyalists are having their faith shaken as the war against Iran progresses into its third week. This war is different; it’s longer, riskier, more complicated, and already having far-reaching effects on the world energy markets. (According to AAA, one month ago, the average price for a gallon of gas nationwide was $2.91; this morning, it’s $3.79.)
It’s more than fair for a MAGA influencer to ask whether the president should have launched this war when he did. But as emphasized yesterday, it’s also moot. You don’t launch a major U.S. military operation and then suddenly say, “never mind,” like Emily Litella. Once you’re in it, you must win it. At least for now, the “declare victory and go home” argument would amount to announcing to the world that A) the Iranian mullahs can shut down access to the Persian Gulf and the U.S. military can’t stop them and B) that the Iranian mullahs can take the absolute hardest punch the Pentagon and the Israel Defense Forces combined can throw, and remain standing at the end of the fight.
Maybe Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei hasn’t appeared on camera because he looks like Quasimodo right now, and maybe his dad saw him as the Fredo of the family. As noted on yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, the reconstruction of Iran’s infrastructure will require a lot of new erections, and apparently Mojtaba Khamenei is the wrong man for the job.
But if he’s still the head of state at the end of this conflict, he will declare that the U.S. lost the war and Iran won, and he won’t be completely wrong in that assessment. After all, our own president demanded “unconditional surrender” and didn’t get it.
Fighting a war is complicated and messy and involves trade-offs; often, our leaders are not looking for the best option but the least bad one. Accurately describing this war requires telling the audience what’s going right and what’s going wrong.
You must wonder if this sort of talk even interests the likes of Owens, Carlson, and some of the other right-wing influencers. (Recall that Carlson claimed that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would lead to World War Three; “The first week of a war with Iran could easily kill thousands of Americans. It could also collapse our economy, as surging oil prices trigger unmanageable inflation. Consider the effects of $30 gasoline.” Gas prices are higher, but they’re about one-tenth what Carlson predicted.)
There are some media voices who can build and maintain an audience by telling their viewers, listeners, or readers a story — “here’s what’s going on in the world.” But a lot of media voices feel the only way they can keep an audience is by becoming the story. It is akin to a soap opera or professional wrestling. You have to tune in to the program to see what happens next to the host. Is this the week that the deep state and the CIA finally get to Carlson? Tune in next time!
Back in 2023, Fox News Channel dismissed Carlson in the aftermath of the Dominion Voting Systems’ now-settled defamation lawsuit. Back then, I wrote that cable news channels faced a new difficult choice: “Is a personality like that, sometimes speaking off-the-cuff on live television five nights a week, worth the risk of a defamation suit? . . . Sure, a larger-than-life, shoot-from-the-hip personality can attract a bigger audience, which means the rates charged to advertisers can be higher. But the Dominion settlement makes those higher advertising rates look like chump change.”
Well, we now see what some big-name cable news hosts and personalities sound like when they don’t have network lawyers looking over their shoulder or executive producers speaking into their earpiece. They’re unedited and free to go in any direction they want. And they are proving to be, to use the technical term, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
There are big advantages to being part of a larger institution. One of them is having editors. (If I didn’t have editors, this newsletter would consist of long diatribes about how Adam Gase ranks among history’s greatest monsters. Good luck and stay classy, San Diego.)
In the end, a lot of the righty media ecosystem isn’t serious. They operate on a very limited emotional bandwidth — mostly fear, anger, and intermittent bursts of over-the-top effusive praise for Trump or whoever they agree with today. They have the memory of a goldfish and all the historical perspective of a teenager on TikTok. Policy bores them and procedure annoys them. They want what they want and they want it now.
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said, “You go to war with the army you have.” The Trump administration finds itself in a messaging war with a media “army” of unhinged narcissists.
ADDENDUM: Over in that other Washington publication, an observation that no matter how the war in Iran shakes out, whoever is running the country after it ends is going to be broke.