Does Donald Trump think Americans are stupid?
After he announced in a video that “a short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran” to “defend the American people” by eliminating “imminent threats” to Americans at home and abroad, the president then listed some of his reasons for taking the U.S. to war.
Presumably, he would tell us about this threat and just how imminent it was.
Trump said, “For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted ‘Death to America’ and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops and the innocent people in many, many countries.”
Okay, but 47 years? Pro-Palestinian protesters in America chant things that are perceived as meaning death to Israel, but no one in either country considers that rhetoric an act of war by the U.S.
What was the president talking about, exactly?
Trump went to the 1979 hostage crisis under President Jimmy Carter. He talked about the 1983 bombing by Iranian proxies of a U.S. marine barrack that killed 241 American servicemen. That was a tragedy dealt with by President Ronald Reagan, who chose to bring American soldiers home. Trump said Iran “knew and were probably involved with the attack on the USS Cole” that happened 26 years ago in 2000, when Bill Clinton was president.
Trump went on to other events including Iranian support for the October 7, 2023 terror attack on Israel by Hamas that took over 1,000 lives and many hostages, including Americans. That happened under President Joe Biden.
But through all his attempted rationalizations at no point did Trump provide a solid, pinpoint—and perhaps most importantly, new—reason for why it was necessary for the U.S. to begin a regime change war at this very moment, something other American presidents did not do when dealing with the Iranian attacks he cited.
Trump’s many “reasons” amounted to really no reason at all. Any intellectually honest observer was left fairly clueless.
Enter Congress. More specifically the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which shared a post on X congratulating the president on “ending” Iran’s “forever war” with the U.S.
I swear I’m not making this up.
“President Trump is ending the forever war that Iran has waged against America for the last 47 years,” the committee’s X account shared, adding “Thank You POTUS.”
So according to this bipartisan committee, a war has been going on between Iran and the U.S. for nearly half a century and Trump’s actions over the weekend were merely a decisive and strong president finally putting an end to it. The balls on these people!
Almost every major poll showed that Americans overwhelmingly did not want the U.S. to go to war with Iran prior to the attacks. Americans were not asked, hypothetically, “Do you want Trump to end the current U.S.–Iran war?” because few to no Americans perceived their country as being in a war with that country.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken Saturday after the U.S. strikes and published Sunday found that, “Only one in four Americans approves of the U.S. strikes that killed Iran’s leader on Saturday, while about half — including one in four Republicans — believe President Donald Trump is too willing to use military force…”
The survey added, “Some 27% of respondents said they approved of the strikes, while 43% disapproved and 29% were not sure.”
These are not favorable numbers for this administration. Furthermore, if their narrative is that Team Trump and the U.S. didn’t start a war, and in fact are simply ending an ongoing 47-year-long one, that’s classic adding insult to injury.
By this metric, realists and restrainers can argue that the U.S. began this supposed ongoing war by pursuing Iranian regime change way back in 1953.
No, Trump just started a war with Iran in which there will be life-and-death and political consequences to which little thought seems to have been given.
But make no mistake: This is a new regime-change war of choice, which most Americans didn’t want, was started by Donald Trump, and will end only God knows how.
Americans aren’t as stupid as Washington apparently hopes, and no amount of spin is going to save them from whatever fallout may come.
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