Trump’s Propaganda Machine Is Flailing on Iran |
Watch enough Pentagon press conferences and a running theme emerges: Pete Hegseth whining about media coverage of the war in Iran. “You’re either informing American people of the truth or you’re not,” the Defense secretary and former Fox News pundit fumed recently. “Behind every headline you write, there’s a helicopter crew in the air, and behind every news banner you write, there’s a battalion on the move. And behind every fake news story, there’s an F-35 pilot executing a dangerous mission. My message to the media is get it right.”
The media, of course, is getting it right. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war has been an abject disaster. It’s a victory for the West that the murderous Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is now dead, but little has otherwise changed: Khamenei’s son is in charge, and the theocratic, autocratic regime remains functional. Israel’s apparent belief that the Iranian people would successfully overthrow the regime if a bombing campaign commenced was entirely mistaken. Netanyahu doesn’t seem to care much either way since he has moved on to immiserating Lebanon, but it’s now clear the war has offered little for the world but needless bloodshed and chaos. A decade ago, Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran was a peaceful, clearheaded attempt to head off further disaster. Diplomacy had a chance. Now, the Middle East is on fire, thousands of civilians are dead, and the U.S. troop death toll threatens to skyrocket if Trump launches any sort of ground invasion as he has indicated he might. The Strait of Hormuz remains throttled; a global energy crisis is already here and, with it, far higher prices at American gas pumps.
Hegseth can pretend all this isn’t true. MAGA has long dwelled within its own propaganda bubble, and that will continue as long as Trump remains in power. For the hard right of Congress and a slice of the most conservative Americans, Trump and his acolytes can continue to lie with impunity. They can, as Karl Rove once infamously declared, create their own reality. But there are limits to all this, as Hegseth, in his whimpering media events, is beginning to find. In a fractured media age, government propaganda is only so effective. Americans still live in a democracy with free access to information and can make up their own minds. They can focus on their own material reality. They cannot be told, wholesale, what to think.
The evidence for this is in the polling, which is catastrophic for Trump — well below 40 percent in many surveys. Democrats, as always, despise him, but independent voters are now in full retreat: The Fox poll showed Trump registering a remarkably low 25 percent approval rating with them. The economy and immigration, once Trump’s two strongest issues, are now huge net negatives, like everything else. The Iran war has only exacerbated the ongoing affordability challenges of most American households. Post-pandemic inflation has lingered while gasoline prices hover at $4 a gallon in most states, more than a dollar up from just a month ago. Americans understand perfectly well that the war in Iran is to blame. The war, in fact, is one of the only military conflicts in modern times that was unpopular from the very moment it began. Few voters rallied around Trump’s flag. The political environment is nothing like 2003, when George W. Bush won bipartisan support for his disastrous invasion of Iraq in the shadow of 9/11.
So despite the understandable narratives of decline, there is a hopeful story to tell about the United States in 2026. Whether Trump is a literal fascist is one of the more exhausting political debates left, and it will continue for many years. What is apparent right now, though, is that he does not have nearly the grip on the U.S. that the 20th-century strongmen, the dictators and the fascists, held on their own nations across the world. Unlike Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, or Fascist Italy, the Trump administration cannot manufacture a case for war and make a majority of citizens believe it. Journalists aren’t cowed by Hegseth; except, perhaps, Bari Weiss’s CBS, the major networks, newspapers, and digital outlets are not behaving as propaganda arms of the federal government. The First Amendment isn’t dead. And for all the distrust Americans have of the news media, they are plenty swayed by what they’ve seen — the reporting, the images, and the video coming from the Middle East.
None of this means Trump can’t cause more destruction. For now, he is ignoring the popular will on Iran. But he does appear to understand what a tremendous liability the war has become. As much as he disregards polls that are bad for him, fixating only on where there’s a glimmer of good news, he is also dimly aware that there is no upside for him in Iran. Economic conditions in the U.S. will only deteriorate. Iran will fight on, shooting rockets at the Gulf States and blocking the Strait of Hormuz until the war ends on terms it finds acceptable. Trump may even sense how weak Hegseth has sounded, like a little boy who can’t understand why the adults won’t play make-believe with him. The dream of dominance is gone for MAGA. It can bomb all the countries it wants, but Americans are largely done with it.
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