Why Trump still needs to sell Iran war to U.S. voters

U.S. President Donald Trump has given Americans a short list of his objectives in attacking Iran, but when it comes to the justification for launching the war and how the conflict is expected to play out, he and his team are sending mixed messages.

“We will easily prevail,” Trump declared Monday at the White House during a military Medal of Honor ceremony. 

Moments later, the president suggested he’s prepared to keep U.S. troops fighting if it doesn’t end quickly. 

“We projected four to five weeks, but we have capability to go far longer than that,” Trump said. “Whatever the time is, it’s OK. Whatever it takes.”

With the conflict still in its earliest days, a pair of polls conducted after the airstrikes began suggest Trump still has plenty of work to do to sell it to the American people. 

A poll for Reuters conducted by polling firm Ipsos found just 27 per cent of Americans who responded said they approved of the strikes on Iran. Meanwhile, 43 per cent said they disapproved and the rest were not sure. The online poll was conducted Saturday and Sunday with 1,282 U.S. adults from a nationally representative panel. 

A poll for CNN conducted by polling firm SSRS found 41 per cent of respondents approved of the decision to take military action against Iran, while 59 per cent disapproved. The poll was conducted via text message with 1,004 adults from a nationally representative panel.

The war comes with Trump’s overall approval rating slumping, as November’s crucial midterm elections that will determine control of Congress creep closer.

Political risk for Trump 

Wars confronting a clear threat to the U.S. have, in the past, often created a rally-round-the-flag effect that boosted the political fortunes of presidents. 

However, the polls suggest it’s far from clear that the Iran war is having such an effect for Trump, even in the short term. If the conflict drags on through the spring, all bets are off — particularly for a president who came to power pledging not to start new wars.

Republican strategist Jason Roe says for Trump, the political risk of the war depends directly on its outcome.

“If we break Iran without terrorist attacks coming to America or harm coming to allies in the region, it will be a political win for Trump,” Roe told Politico on the weekend. 

“If this expands into a protracted conflict, or ends up with troops on the ground, it will be a liability,” he said. 

Debate is swirling about how protracted the conflict could be and whether the U.S. will have to put troops on the ground to achieve its objectives. 

“Our objectives are clear,” Trump said Monday, and laid out four of them: 

• Destroying Iran’s missile capabilities.
• “Annihilating” Iran’s navy.
• Ensuring Iran “can never obtain a nuclear weapon.”
• Ensuring Iran cannot support “terrorist armies” in other countries.

Notably not on that list: regime change, even though Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in Saturday’s first strikes.

Still, Trump and his administration have made it clear they want to see Iran’s Islamic government overthrown, they just want the Iranian people to make it happen once the bombs stop falling.  

Seth G. Jones, a longtime former adviser to the Pentagon, now president of the defence and security department at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank, predicts the conflict will not be over quickly. 

“When you start talking about trying to shape a regime, I think you’re talking about months if not longer,” Jones said Monday in a panel discussion. 

“Even with ground troops, trying to social engineer a foreign government is incredibly difficult,” he said. “Trying to do that without a meaningful ground presence I think is going to be virtually impossible.”

Boots on the ground? 

Trump isn’t ruling out sending troops into Iran. 

“Every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump told the New York Post on Monday. 

Likewise, Trump’s Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is declining to rule out deploying U.S. soldiers inside the country. 

“We’ll go as far as we need to go to advance American interests,” Hegseth said during a Monday news conference at the Pentagon in response to a question about troops on the ground. 

For several months, Trump’s top political advisers have been urging him to put far more emphasis on the economy and the cost of living, shown repeatedly by polling to be the top concerns of U.S. voters. 

The war could not only distract Trump from focusing on an economic message over the coming weeks or months, but could also trigger higher energy costs for Americans. 

War ‘not what the American people want’: Schumer

The Democrats are already signalling they will try to capitalize on such a scenario. 

Chuck Schumer, the Democrat leader in the Senate, said Monday that the war is “not what the American people want.” 

“They don’t want a war that leads to lost American lives and that costs billions and billions of taxpayer dollars. They don’t want a war that raises the price of gas at the pump,” Schumer said in a speech from the Senate floor. 

Sabrina Singh, who served as Pentagon deputy press secretary in the Biden administration, says the war will push up the price of gas, electricity and groceries for the average American.

“This is exactly what Republicans do not want to be running on, they do not want to be talking about Iran, they want to be talking about the economy,” Singh told CNN. 

On Monday, Trump and key members of his cabinet sought to make their case for war, but the reasons they offered were at times inconsistent.  

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as Trump’s national security adviser, said the “imminent threat” that Iran would retaliate once Israel launched its strikes against the regime was the reason for the U.S. military operation. 

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces,” Rubio told reporters on Capitol Hill as he arrived to brief lawmakers on the war. 

“We knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after [Iran] before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” Rubio said. “We were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.” 

Hegseth emphasized Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities. 

“Iran was building powerful missiles and drones to create a conventional shield for their nuclear blackmail ambitions,” Hegseth told a news conference at the Pentagon. 

“Tehran was not negotiating. They were stalling, buying time to reload their missile stockpiles and restart their nuclear ambitions,” Hegseth said. “Our bases, our people, our allies, all in their crosshairs.” 

Trump emphasized regime change. 

“Today, the United States military continues to carry out large scale combat operations in Iran to eliminate the grave threats posed to America by this terrible terrorist regime,” he said in his first remarks on Monday. 

“For almost 47 years, this regime has been attacking the United States and killing Americans,” he said. 

“This was our last, best chance to strike — what we’re doing right now — and eliminate the intolerable threats posed by this sick and sinister regime.”

There could indeed be plenty of different reasons for attacking a regime that has long subjugated women, killed thousands of its own people in recent protests and propped up the militant forces of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Whether U.S. voters have an appetite for a sustained military operation to transform Iran away from all that looks set to be tested over the coming weeks or months.