When Donald Trump campaigned to return to the presidency in 2024, much was made of his supposed aversion to overseas wars – and to Americans fighting and dying in them.
This pulled together an unlikely electoral coalition. Much of the Maga base believes “America First” means keeping US troops at home, and not being the world’s peacekeepers. But American Muslim voters in cities like Dearborn, Michigan, often turned out for Trump believing he would be less interventionist in the Gaza conflict, and the Middle East more broadly, than Democrats.
As the explosive consequences of Trump’s new war with Iran play out right across the region, it could not be clearer that this logic was spectacularly wrong. Trump now wants to play nation-builder, and he seems not to care about either the political cost nor the human toll.
Trump has no Congressional approval to launch his war on Iran, and he has no popular mandate to do so either – polling suggests only one in four Americans backs his operation, dramatically lower numbers than any US conflict overseas for decades. History shows that support for wars only drops with time, as Americans see the cost in lives, as well as in financial terms.
Trump also appears to have attacked Iran without any clear objective, or with any plan for what should happen next. He has said he wants to negotiate with Iran’s new leadership, now that Ayatollah Khamenei is dead, but complained that he doesn’t know who that is, because he keeps killing the successors.
He has suggested regime change would be good, but has no plan for it other than hoping Iran’s military surrenders its guns “to the people”. He has told some media outlets the war will be over in three days, and others that it will last for weeks. The 2003 Iraq war showed the terrible consequences of starting a conflict in the Middle East with inadequate planning for the aftermath. Trump’s Iran war is revealing, in real time, what happens when you do it with no plan at all.
All of this is potentially disastrous for Iran, for its neighbours, and for the world – not least because 20 per cent of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which is currently closed to traffic. But the real political difficulty for Trump himself is only just beginning, and it will intensify as American soldiers die in what looks like a completely pointless conflict. How, after all, can any death in this conflict have any meaning when even Trump doesn’t seem to know what exactly he’s trying to achieve with it?
Trump got lucky in Venezuela. It was not a completely bloodless win – a US pilot was seriously injured, and had he not heroically avoided crashing his helicopter, everyone on board may have died – but it was close to it, at least on the US side. That may have contributed to an air of invincibility around the president.
The war on Iran is already different. At least three US soldiers have already died, and five more are seriously wounded. Trump announced their death in a video where he paid tribute to “those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation”. Already there is footage of a US F-15 fighter jet crash landing in Kuwait. When American lives are at stake, the public turns to the president for meaning, as well as for answers. They need to understand what those young men are dying for, that their sacrifice actually meant something.
Trump is constitutionally incapable of delivering any of that. He has already been asked about the first casualties of his war, and his answer was chilling in its indifference. “Sadly, there will likely be more,” he said. “That’s the way it is.”
Trump’s next line, a half-hearted “but we’ll do everything possible where that won’t be the case”, might have been intended to offer some reassurance. But it will surely ring hollow to many.
Those who have followed Trump closely know that this indifference is hardly anything new. Trump mocked John McCain, who spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, for his captivity, saying: “He’s not a war hero… I like people who weren’t captured”. He denied well-sourced reports that he skipped a visit to a cemetery honouring America’s war dead because it was “filled with losers”. Trump, who used the medical excuse of “bone spurs” to avoid military service himself, does not appear to care about the sacrifice of others.
So far, Trump has got away with this because most of his voters don’t know about it, and because it’s ancient history. This is different. The American troops fighting and dying today are doing so at Trump’s behest – by skipping Congressional approval, he has no one to hide behind. Everyone knows this war is happening because Trump personally wanted it.
That’s why Trump’s “the way it is” comment could easily be remembered. Trump is trying to shrug something off as just the way of the world, when instead it’s the direct consequence of his own actions.
Trump’s base voted him in to fix the economy, close the borders, and end foreign wars. They were willing to forgive him almost anything if he delivered on that. If the deal falls apart, they will turn on him just as viciously as they’ve turned on every other politician. And he won’t like that one bit.
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