President Donald Trump’s Monday evening press conference about the war—or is it an “excursion?”—in Iran might have been frustrating to observers on all sides of the conflict, but it was also illustrative of how he keeps his unwieldy political coalition together.
Trump vacillated between describing a nation-building exercise that is only in its infancy, though his reference to “the beginning of building a new country” leaves room for interpretation as to who is supposed to be doing the building, and something closer to a weekend getaway in Tehran that will be over before you know it.
“We’re very proud to be involved in this and it’s going to be ended soon,” he told reporters. “And if it starts up again … they’ll be hit even harder.” After talking about building a new Iran, he added, “[W]e could call it a tremendous success right now, or we could go further. And we’re going to go further.”
So should we be singing John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”—“War is over, if you want it/War is over now”—or the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun”?
“I think it could be both,” Trump replied when asked to reconcile his statement that the war is almost over with comments by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that it is only just getting started.
Though maddening to many, this is why Trump has managed to largely hold together a base of support with wildly disparate foreign-policy views, at least as measured by public opinion polling (as opposed to social media activity).
There is a choose-your-own-adventure element to Trump’s Iran intervention. Many rank-and-file Trump supporters who don’t want to see an extended war in Iran still trust, based on various comments the president has made and most of his actual foreign-policy record over two nonconsecutive terms, that there won’t be one.
Those who want to see Trump consign the Islamic Republic to the ashheap of history once and for all can point to other things that the president has said, including bellicose statements about Iran that predate his serious national political involvement, his reputation for toughness and risk-taking, and an increasingly hawkish turn.
Trump has lost some support, because his Iran mission has clearly gone beyond the limited strikes that have characterized most of his previous uses of military force, but not much.
Even those wary of or downright opposed to what Trump is doing in Iran hope he will eventually find an off-ramp. Thus it makes more sense to stay alive politically to oppose each new escalatory step or encourage each opportunity to declare victory and leave rather than turn against Trump as the second coming of George W. Bush.
This is surely the mindsight of some inside the Trump administration as well as outside it.
It probably doesn’t help that Trump’s most outspoken opponents with MAGA track records have become radicalized against Israel in ways he never will be. Or that Lindsey Graham has a better relationship with Trump these days than Rand Paul does. Or that the hawks have largely kept their Fox shows while Tucker Carlson has a podcast. Or that doves like Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene were on the outs with Trump before bombs started falling on Tehran.
But ultimately, Trump has been the titular head of the Republican Party for a decade. His political movement dates back even further than that. While he has alienated some of the most anti-interventionist of his supporters, he has a deep reservoir of goodwill with most. He’s spent the political capital he accumulated with the swing voters who backed him in 2024. Now he is doing the same with his base, but he has much more money left in that particular bank.
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Most voters base their foreign-policy views on whether they trust the commander-in-chief. That is true of most of the people who voted for Trump, especially those who have stuck with him through Russiagate, the 2020 election, two impeachments, multiple indictments, one conviction, assassination attempts, and everything else. They trust him to avoid an Iraq-like fiasco in Iran no matter how much he seems willing to risk one.
That’s not where the bulk of the electorate is. It’s not where all Trump voters are. But this describes enough Trump voters.
Many of MAGA’s nation-building skeptics still fervently believe Trump, and the troops, will come home soon enough. They will leave the lights on for him.
