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KINSELLA: Donald Trump learning wars easy to start but hard to finish
This writer predicted a month ago that the war in Iran would become very unpopular, very soon
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Donald Trump’s apparatchiks can call it whatever they want, but it’s a war. And, a month later, it’s still raging.
KINSELLA: Donald Trump learning wars easy to start but hard to finish Back to video
A month ago, this writer made ten predictions about why the war would likely become very unpopular, very soon.
Let’s see how accurate they were.
I said both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were unpopular in their respective countries – and might get less popular.
That has certainly been the case for Trump.
As of today, Trump is the most unpopular president in recent polling history. Presently, Trump has 33% support, a record low for him.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, earned a 60% “trust” figure from Israelis at the start of the war. Today, however, his Right-wing coalition would still fall short of a majority win.
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This writer predicted the war would get very unpopular very fast. That has certainly been the case in the United States – and, to a lesser degree, in Israel.
A CNN poll released Wednesday showed Americans – nearly 70% of them – disapprove or “strongly disapprove” of the war. That number is growing, CNN reported.
Meanwhile, in Israel, an end-of-March poll had a different result. There, a nearly-identical number – nearly 70% – approved of the war. But that represents a substantial drop from the start of the conflict, when more than 82% of Israelis were onside.
At the start of the war, Trump said his goal was regime change. I opined that was very unlikely without proverbial boots on the ground.
Tragically, the terroristic Islamic dictatorship is now even stronger than before. It has expanded the conflict to surrounding Arab states, effectively padlocked the crucial Strait of Hormuz, and hammered the global economy. No one now seriously expects regime change in Iran.
In November 2024, Trump told his supporters: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.” After Iran, after military incursions in Venezuela, after threatening to use force to take over Greenland, few now believe Trump’s peacemaker pledge.
The political consequences of that broken promise? Trump’s Republicans now face a wipe-out in November’s midterms – loss of control in the House of Representatives is a certainty, and loss of his Senate majority is highly likely. Meanwhile, prominent members of Trump’s MAGA movement are rebelling in public, with some (Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly) expressing outrage.
Could the Make America Great Again movement atomize over the war? Perhaps. But that one prediction hasn’t come true, yet. And it’s the single glimmer of hope for Trump.
GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote in the New York Times last week: “My polling shows that MAGA thinks Mr. Trump got it right when it comes to Iran. When I separate Republican respondents on whether they think of themselves as a Trump supporter or a Republican Party supporter first, I find that more than nine in 10 Trump-first Republicans support the Iran strikes, compared with only 72% of party-first Republicans.”
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It doesn’t take a crystal ball to note that the number of casualties would grow with each day the war raged on. At present, at least 15 U.S. troops have been killed in the conflict, and 520 have been injured since Feb. 28. In Iran, at least 3,500 have been killed, and injuries exceed 24,000.
7. Where are the Iranians?
Before the war started, Israel’s Mossad told Netanyahu – and American military leaders – that Iranians would rise up and topple their terroristic government when the bombing commenced.
That hasn’t happened. And now the war is actually dividing the Iranian diaspora.
As the Times also reported this week: “Even among those who agree that Iran’s Islamic authoritarian government must go, there have long been deep disagreements about how to achieve that goal, what form Iran’s next government should take and who is to blame for Iran’s current predicament. Those debates are also happening inside the country.”
At the start of the war, this writer predicted that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – a terror group – would be very difficult to defeat.
A month later, that remains more true.
The IRGC’s iron grip on the country has not been loosened in any meaningful way. Nearly 200,000-strong, the IRGC remain fully in control.
At the beginning of the Iran-Israel-America conflict, Toronto Sun colleague Brian Lilley noted on my Kinsellacast podcast that the U.S. midterm elections were coming – and he added that, if the war didn’t end soon, Trump would lose very badly.
The polls validate Lilley’s take – Iran is rapidly turning into quagmire for the U.S. President, and it could reduce him to the lamest of lame ducks in November.
Wars, I wrote a month ago, are easy to start – but not so easy to end.
Donald Trump is now learning that truth the hard way.
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