The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 11 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump’s attack on Iran is the most unpopular U.S. war in the history of modern polling. The New York Times looked at polls on U.S. wars going back to World War II and found Trump’s war at the very bottom of the heap. This comes as new exchanges between reporters and the White House show that Trump’s positions on the war are falling apart. In particular, one exchange with a reporter over the bombing of an Iranian school blew up in Trump’s face rather spectacularly. We think it’s significant that the public is not reflexively rallying to Trump’s war—it says something fundamental about the American public during the Trump era.
Paul Waldman has a good piece on his Substack, The Cross Section, digging into why Trump’s war is so unpopular. So we’re talking to him about all this today. Paul, good to see you. Thanks for coming on.
Paul Waldman: My pleasure. Thanks a lot.
Sargent: So the Times looked at 10 wars going back to World War II and found that initial support for Trump’s war is lower than at the outset of any other conflict. The Times put support for the Iran war at 41 percent. Other averages of polls have it even lower, at 38 percent. Paul, the key here is that there’s no reflexive support for the commander in chief. In fact, I wonder if it’s the opposite—people are predisposed to see Trump’s case for war as, you know, made up. Which it is. What do you think?
Waldman: Yeah, I think we have this perception that there is what we often call the rally-round-the-flag effect. Whenever there’s a war, the public rallies around the flag and wants to defend the country and comes to the president’s side. And the truth is that that’s not necessarily true—it really is contingent on a lot of things. It has certainly happened on many occasions in the past. But if you look back at events like even the beginning of the Vietnam War—you don’t even have to go back to World War II or to Korea—or if you look at the Gulf War, the first Gulf War with George H.W. Bush, which was very popular, or Afghanistan, or even Iraq in 2003, what you see is that in all of those cases, they were very different from this one.
First of all, the presidents at those times were very popular to begin with. So you had a popular president who was coming in and trying to make this case for war. The second, and I think most important thing, is that in every one of those cases, there was a real argument being made that America was under threat. And in some cases it may have been exaggerated, but at least it was plausible.
Now, in this case, not only is there no real reason to think that Iran is some kind of imminent threat to the U.S., the Trump administration barely attempted to convince the public that this was something they had to do. There wasn’t some kind of long propaganda campaign that led up to the war. The explanations for why we were doing it have shifted back and forth constantly. And it’s happening with a president whose popularity ratings are in the 30s. So people are not predisposed to believe what he has to say to begin with, even if he were making an effective case—which obviously he is not.
Sargent: As we all know, it’s looking likely that the U.S. bombed an Iranian elementary school, killing scores of children. Reports show a Tomahawk missile striking near the school, and that’s our missile. Trump has said, implausibly, that Iran might have gotten a Tomahawk and done the bombing itself. Now listen to this exchange between Trump and Times reporter Shawn McCreesh:
Shawn McCreesh (voiceover): You just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war. But you’re the only person in your government saying this. Even your defense secretary wouldn’t say that when he was asked, standing over your shoulder on your plane on Saturday. Why are you the only person saying this?
Donald Trump (voiceover): Because I just don’t know enough about it. I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation. But Tomahawks are used by others, as you know. Numerous other nations have Tomahawks — they buy them from us. But I will certainly, whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report.
Sargent: Paul, that is utterly humiliating. Also note that Trump admits to not knowing much about the situation, which accidentally undermines his case for claiming that Iran did the bombing. It just blew up in his face so spectacularly.
Waldman: Trump is not incredibly engaged with the details in the best of times. And if you want to wage a propaganda campaign, you have to have a clear message—you have to repeat it over and over. The administration has been all over the place on all of this. Some days we’re talking about how the Iranian people ought to rise up and we’re really doing this as a favor to them. And then the next day Trump will put something on Truth Social that threatens to rain down fire and fury on Iran and make sure that it can’t become a country again for decades to come.
We’re also in the process of bombing things that are important to the country—that’s something important to understand, too. It seems like we’ve almost run out of real military targets there. I mean, obviously there are still missiles and drones, and a lot of them are hidden, and the U.S. is trying to find them and take them out. But at the same time, Israel is bombing oil depots and we’re attacking infrastructure in Iran. And presumably if the country is going to want to rebuild, those are things that they’re going to need, and the misery of the Iranian people in the short term is only going to be exacerbated.
So you would think the administration would be working extra hard to convince the world that we are actually on the side of the Iranian people, and to convince the Iranian people that maybe they should rise up and overthrow their leadership. But right now we’re not doing either of those things, because this administration is consumed by bloodlust, and people like Hegseth and the rest of them can’t even seem to get their story straight.
Sargent: Well, and I think that gets at another reason why support for this war is historically low. That exchange with that reporter really shows, I think, the media being far more aggressive and far more skeptical of the official line than we’ve seen the press be in the run-up to other wars. The terrible nightmare was, of course, the run-up to Iraq, where the press was really, really too willing to take the administration’s horseshit seriously on WMDs and so forth. I think it’s a really encouraging thing to see the press sort of stand up and assert itself the way it has been — particularly given that Trump is essentially trying to use state power to punish any media organization that shows adversarial scrutiny.
Waldman: Yeah, I think there’s a certain amount of coverage that is what the administration wants, especially on TV news — these sort of very exciting kinetic videos of explosions and things like that through night-vision goggles. We see planes getting blown up and stuff like that. And that is catnip for television news because they want those images, and they replay them over and over and do the kind of play-by-play that you often see in war coverage. But at the same time, you’re right that there is a lot more skepticism from the press corps in general. And this administration has built up a lot of ill will.
Let’s not forget that they basically kicked out the entire Pentagon press corps and replaced them with a bunch of sycophants from far-right media. And so those Pentagon reporters who have been kind of pushed out of the building—they’re not going to necessarily be so inclined to take the administration line after they’ve been treated this way.
They’ve had to spend most of the last year cultivating sources that are not necessarily what the press secretary is saying at the Pentagon. And so they’ve had to go and be a little more entrepreneurial about how they can get information. And that’s going to push them toward more skeptical sources and just sort of put them in a position where they’re not going to want to just accept it when Pete Hegseth says that everything is going fantastically and we’re just going to amp up our lethality tomorrow and it’s going to be even more lethal. And isn’t that awesome?
Sargent: That brings me to an exchange with Karoline Leavitt I want to highlight. Leavitt was trying to explain Trump’s position on the bombing of the Iranian school. She was pressed on why he’s saying this stuff. And then this happens:
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): And the president has a right to share his opinions with the American public, but he has said he’ll accept the conclusion of that investigation. And frankly, we’re not going to be harassed by the New York Times, who’s been putting out a lot of articles on this, making claims that have just not been verified by the Department of War, to quickly wrap up this investigation because the New York Times is calling on us to do so.
Sargent: So that’s just amazing. She faults the Times for reporting stuff that hasn’t been verified by the Defense Department—she’s faulting them for doing independent, adversarial reporting, quite literally. The thing is, she can’t explain why Trump is pulling stuff out of his ass on such a serious matter. And the truth also is that adversarial reporting on this war really is terrible for them. She knows that—she revealed she knows that. Your thoughts on that.
Waldman: Yeah. And this administration could actually get at least somewhat better coverage if it wanted to, if it wasn’t so unremittingly hostile to reporters asking even the most basic questions.
Now, I don’t want to say you should have some kind of sympathy for Karoline Leavitt, but it certainly can’t be easy when Donald Trump is your boss and every time he opens his mouth he’s going to contradict what he said 10 minutes before and say something that is going to require you, as his spokesperson, to kind of turn somersaults in order to try to justify what he’s saying. Because after all, the line from the White House is that Trump never misspeaks—he never makes a mistake, everything that he says is perfect and true. And so that’s the framework that they have to start from.
But they also know that what he wants from them—from the people who deal with the press—is to be antagonistic and hostile and abusive toward reporters. That’s what he expects, and he watches them on TV. And so they do that. And then there is a way to have a somewhat adversarial relationship with the media that is still respectful, and can make it so that they will hear you out when you have a case to make.
There have been more and less skilled White House press shops at that. But the smart ones know that if you treat reporters like the professionals that they are and you don’t lie to them, you can push back on them when you want to. And that might help you get your story out in a way that is preferable. But if you’re just berating them and abusing them all the time, reporters are not going to take anything that you say seriously. And in this case, they shouldn’t, because the Trump administration is almost never going to tell them the truth.
Sargent: Well, it’s kind of funny because Trump keeps saying different things and contradicting himself and offering different rationales, and yet the administration’s propagandists are required at all times to say that whatever Trump just said is perfect. So maybe the way they think of it in their heads is whatever Trump is saying now is even more perfect than the thing he said three days before. You know what I mean?
Waldman: Yeah, it can’t be easy to keep up with.
Sargent: Well, yeah. And that was actually captured really well in yet another exchange with Karoline Leavitt that I want to highlight. The reporter asked Leavitt why Trump keeps shifting the goalposts on when he says Iran would have gotten a nuke if he hadn’t undertaken this world-historically important invasion. His latest is seven days—Iran would have gotten a nuke in seven days. Complete horseshit. We know from New York Times reporting on the internal debates that American officials say it’s not so. But regardless, he keeps changing it. Leavitt was asked about this, and here’s how she responded.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): This was a feeling the president had based on facts—facts provided to him by his top negotiators, who had been engaged with the Iranian regime in a good-faith effort. The Iranian regime was lying, deceiving the United States of America, clearly trying to continue their nuclear program to create a bomb that would of course threaten the United States of America.
Sargent: So I’m noticing this formulation more and more lately—Trump is basing things on a feeling which is based on facts. Now, I don’t know if that’s just Karoline Leavitt trolling us because it’s such a ludicrous formulation. But I think it’s pretty revealing that even Karoline Leavitt is saying that Trump is kind of basing things on the seat of his pants, essentially.
Waldman: Yeah, he is extrapolating. And I guess it’s when they’re in a trap where he says something that is so obviously untrue that they have to come up with some kind of pretzel twist of a way to make it seem like it’s sort of true, or it’s true if you feel that it’s true.
And this is particularly difficult with regard to Iran’s nuclear program, because first of all, they had claimed last summer that it had been totally obliterated, which wasn’t true at the time. But it was certainly the case that Iran was not in possession of any nuclear weapons, and it would take them quite a bit of work to build one. But now Trump is coming out and saying, well, you know, they were about to get one—which is utterly preposterous.
So how do you explain that when, you know, even Republicans, even Trump’s allies, have charged that they have the nuke and they’re about to shoot it at us? But of course, that’s the kind of thing you need if you’re going to claim that this is an imminent threat. And this gets back to one of the places that we started—about what an administration, a president, needs to convince people of to go along with the war. They have to feel threatened.
And so now you have Republicans out there saying, well, we’ve been at war with them for 47 years, and that’s the imminent threat. Of course, that is the opposite of what “imminent” means. But Trump, I think, feels that. And so he has to say, well, yeah, it was imminent because they were about to nuke us. And this is the paradox that we saw in the Iraq War and before—we’re about to, and then we do, attack a country that is far, far less powerful than we are. And yet they have to convince the public that this small country that we can squash like a bug is actually about to wage war on us and is about to show up in Coney Island with a submarine and a nuclear weapon attached to it, or whatever.
And so it’s not enough to say they’re a troublemaker in the region and that’s a problem for long-term security. You have to say that they’re about to get you and your family. And Trump is unrestrained by any kind of tether to what’s actually true. And then it’s left to people like Karoline Leavitt and the rest of the people in the White House to kind of clean up after him and try to reframe what he said as something that actually has some connection to the truth. And that is no easy task.
Sargent: Right. And there’s a kernel of truth to what Leavitt said there, in the sense that he really is basing this on feeling. The one thing that’s false about what she said is those feelings aren’t based on facts—they’re just based on feelings, and who knows where those feelings are coming from.
Waldman: Yeah. And it gets to sort of the most profound unanswered question, I think, for the public in this—which is, why are we doing this? Like, if you ask the average American on the street why we’re invading Iran, why we’re waging war on them, most people would have a really hard time coming up with a clear answer, because they haven’t gotten one from the administration.
You can say a hundred different things about how it’s a bunch of bad guys and it’s a fundamentalist Islamic regime and they oppress their people and they cause trouble in the region and they support terrorist groups. But why are we going to war right now against Iran? And the truth is that Donald Trump himself probably doesn’t know—and if he knows, he certainly has not communicated that clearly to any of us.
So that is the question that they haven’t answered, and it’s so basic to this. We have to know why we’re doing this. Why are Americans coming home in caskets? Why are a thousand or more Iranians dying? Why are we bombing—even if it was an innocent mistake—why are we bombing a girls’ school and killing 165 children? Why are we expending something like a billion dollars a day on this? If they can’t answer that question, then the whole effort, as a piece of communication, is just a failure.
Sargent: And I think you really put your finger on the core of the issue when you said that Donald Trump doesn’t know why we’re doing this. The real reason, I think—or at least among the reasons—that this war is so unpopular compared to other ones, is that everybody knows, voters know, that Trump doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, that he doesn’t have any idea why we’re doing this. Voters know that. Voters see that the emperor has no clothes.
I mean, Trump over the past year has been a kind of emperor-getting-naked moment in slow motion—really like one piece of clothing getting cast off after another. And so that’s, I think, why that moment with reporter Shawn McCreesh was so devastating and so humiliating. It just revealed so starkly that Trump has no clue why he says what he says, that he’s just making it up on the fly.
There he was essentially saying Iran bombed the school. And then when the reporter reframed it—so Iran somehow got one of our missiles and bombed its own school—it just showed the utter absurdity of this man up there who has no fucking idea what he’s talking about, and the utter absurdity of letting him make these kinds of decisions.
Waldman: Yeah. And if he was showing himself to be competent in other areas—if the economy was going great and all kinds of other things were working out really well—I think that there would be a lot of Americans who would give him the benefit of the doubt, who might say, I’m not too sure about this, but he seems to know what he’s doing, so for now I won’t object.
But when so many other things are going so poorly, and immediately you see all these ill effects—especially gas prices, which are unavoidable, you see them on every corner—at that point, nobody is ready to give them the benefit of the doubt.
The people who are die-hard Trump supporters are with him. But the rest of the public is basically saying, I need a really good attempt at persuasion, I really need a really good argument to know why this is something that I should be supportive of. And he certainly hasn’t given them that, and they don’t have any reason to give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s hard to see that the support he has now for this war—about 40 percent—is going to get any higher. If anything, it’s probably going to go down as time goes on.
Sargent: It’s really kind of down at 38, 37 in some polls, and that’s sort of his floor number, that hard, molten core of MAGA—that 37, 38 percent. And that’s what he’s got right now. And this is just getting started.
Paul Waldman, always a pleasure to talk to you, folks. If you enjoyed this conversation, check out Paul’s Substack, The Cross Section. Paul, great to see you. Thanks for coming on.
Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.
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