President Donald Trump talking to reporter aboard Air Force One on December 9, 2025 (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley/Flickr)
President Donald Trump’s Iran war consistently polls in the low 40s, historically poor for a nascent military campaign — and a prominent columnist predicts his efforts to bully Americans into changing their minds will not work.
“On Sunday night, during a tirade on his Truth Social website, the president attacked The Wall Street Journal for reporting on an Iranian military strike against American planes in Saudi Arabia, and called on other news outlets to be charged with ‘TREASON,’” seasoned columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote for The New York Times. “Brendan Carr, Trump’s thuggish Federal Communications Commission chairman, threatened to revoke broadcasters’ licenses over their war coverage. Criticizing CNN’s reporting on the war last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made clear that he’s hoping its new owners quash its independence: ‘The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.’”
Goldberg argued that “rarely in modern history has an American administration made such blatantly authoritarian efforts to subdue its critics. Such naked coercion is a screaming sign of democratic breakdown. But we shouldn’t lose sight of how Trump is failing to bend the country to his will. Even as he’s wrecking American institutions, Trump is revealing the limits of his cultural influence.”
Goldberg went on to list prominent conservatives who are splitting with Trump on the war, including Megyn Kelly, a right-wing streamer; Tucker Carlson, a right-wing podcaster; and Joe Rogan, a fellow right-wing podcaster.
“Well, it just seems so insane, based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right?” Rogan said during a Tuesday episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” his podcast. “He ran on, ‘No more wars,’ ‘End these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”
Goldberg broke down why she believes Trump has failed to convert Americans on Iran.
“One reason the old hawkish canards no longer work is that Trump has so degraded the aura that used to surround America’s commander in chief,” Goldberg explained. “A recent fund-raising email for Trump’s political action committee used a photograph of the president — wearing a white baseball hat — receiving the remains of American service members. With his war raging, he’s spent the last two weekends golfing. Trump refuses to treat his role with reverence, so others don’t feel much need to either.”
Joseph Cirincione, a national security analyst and anti-nuclear activist, pointed out on his Substack on Sunday that Trump has not provided any evidence that Iran poses an imminent threat to the United States.
“Trump hasn’t presented a scintilla of evidence that Iran represents an imminent nuclear or missile threat to America,” Cirincione wrote. “He has skipped the laborious process of manipulating the intelligence, presenting false reports and assessments, of trying to convince the American people, the Congress, our allies and the United Nations that there was an urgent necessity to go to war.”
While Trump has not managed to bring ordinary Americans around to the Iran war, he has done so with his own MAGA base.
“But MAGA, a populist movement allegedly built on an urge for American isolationism and an aversion to regime change and nation building abroad, has effortlessly dumped those supposed principles and flip-flopped into a rabid band of war-hungry neocons,” wrote USA Today columnist Chris Brennan.
He added, “It prompts the question: Does MAGA really care about anything at all, except Trump's next impetuous ‘excursion’? This is not some policy-based worldview. It's just a cult of personality.”
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