Sideways

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

 

Once more, for emphasis: Donald Trump’s base will not turn on him if he strikes Iran.

 

Yes, I know, a new Economist/YouGov poll found 53 percent of Republicans oppose the U.S. joining Israel’s military campaign versus 23 percent who support it. Even if that’s accurate (and maybe it isn’t), let’s check back on the numbers after the president gives the order to attack. The faithful are far more likely to question a policy when it’s hypothetical than after the divine leader has bet his political chip stack on it.

 

Even populist “influencers” who spent the last week discovering that they’re not so influential won’t turn against Trump for crossing them on Iran. The modern right is a movement by and for demagogues, and the art of demagoguery is finding scapegoats for one’s own failures. Israel, the “deep state,” the generals, Fox News: If America joins the fight, Tuckerites and Bannonistas will have no trouble shifting blame away from the president. The cardinal rule of authoritarian cultism—Trump cannot fail, he can only be failed—remains in effect.

 

So does the old adage that “victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan.” Public opinion about the wisdom of attacking Iran is highly outcome-dependent, I suspect. If the U.S. and Israel obliterate the regime’s nuclear program without American casualties, most Republicans will glory in the president’s show of strength. Even some voters in the other party will tilt in favor retroactively. There’s no arguing with success.

 

But what if intervening in this case turns out not to be so successful? There are a lot of ways entering the war could go sideways politically for Trump and his administration.

 

The same poll mentioned above finds Democrats split 15-65 and independents divided 11-61 on involving the U.S. in Israel’s Iran campaign. Across the entire population, the spread is 16-60. That’s an awfully deep hole of skepticism from which to begin a military campaign. By comparison, Americans supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 at a clip of 72-25.

 

What sort of political headaches might the president face if he attacks Iran and things don’t go as planned? Let’s count.

 

Casualties.

 

Iran seems helpless. Israel has destroyed its air defenses and some of its missile arsenal and has already taken the brunt of what’s left. Bombing the Fordow nuclear site, which is buried 300 feet underground, may be a challenge for the Israelis but it’s become a layup for the U.S. Air Force and Trump can hardly contain his excitement about it. “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” he boasted yesterday on Truth Social. (“We”?) He’s never more ruthless than when an enemy appears powerless to resist him.

 

But Iran isn’t powerless. Reportedly it’s “prepared missiles and other military equipment for strikes on U.S. bases” if Trump enters the fray. The Houthis, the regime’s proxy force in Yemen, will resume shooting at U.S. ships; Shiite militias will attack U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria; Iran might mine the Strait of Hormuz to bottle up American warships.

 

If Americans die, what was supposed to be a turkey shoot in a war of choice would suddenly have a dire human cost. Joe Biden was haunted for the rest of his presidency by the deaths of the 13 U.S. soldiers killed in a suicide bombing during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. The toll from engaging with Iran could exceed that by multiples.

 

Iranians could also die, of course, and in much larger numbers. That’s a special political problem given the care with which American politicians typically distinguish the civilian population there from its government. The Iranian people have been less prone to radicalization than, say, the Palestinians of Gaza; they’ve chafed under clerical rule for decades, which is why regime change seems like a live possibility as the government grows weaker under bombardment.

 

Iranian civilians are on our side, in other words, or so the conventional wisdom has it. If the U.S. or Israel does something to kill many of them—another live possibility—how would Trump justify it to the majority of Americans who are already skeptical of the war? How “pro-Western” would Iranians remain in the aftermath?

 

Bad intelligence.

 

Surreal as it may seem, we’re again on the brink of going to war in the Middle East based on dubious intelligence about an enemy’s nuclear ambitions. But if Trump moves forward on Iran, he’ll be guilty of something George W. Bush wasn’t—disbelieving his own intel bureau about the urgency of the threat.

 

Both the U.S. and Israel agree that Iran is stockpiling enriched uranium. Gen. Erik Kurilla, the head of Central Command, testified recently that at the rate the Iranians are going they’ll soon have enough fissile material to make 10 nuclear bombs in three weeks. The threat is real; the question is whether it’s imminent. Israeli intelligence believes that Iran is moving toward actually building a bomb. American intelligence disagrees, claiming that the evidence proves only that the Islamic Republic is researching the possibility.

 

If the president’s deputies don’t believe preemptive military action is needed, why is he on the brink of ordering it? If he trusts Benjamin Netanyahu’s risk assessment over his own team’s, someone should remind him that Bibi has been warning about near-term Iranian nukes for fully 30 years.

 

This deep dive by the New York Times into the White House’s deliberations confirms my suspicions from last week about how Trump caught war fever. Israel reportedly chose to attack against his wishes because Iran’s defenses were weak, its missile arsenal depleted, and nuclear negotiations with Washington slow going, making the moment opportune. As expected, the president was seduced by the success of the first wave of airstrikes: “His favorite TV channel, Fox News, was broadcasting wall-to-wall imagery of what it was portraying as Israel’s military genius. And Mr. Trump could not resist claiming some credit for himself,” according to the Times.

 

Either he doesn’t have faith in his own intelligence advisers or he’s so intoxicated by the prospect of a seemingly easy win that he doesn’t care if there’s an imminent threat. Whichever it is, he’ll have a hard time explaining his decision to join the fight if things go sideways.

 

Congress hasn’t approved.

 

Another notable difference from Bush is that Dubya sought and received authorization from Congress to use military force against Iraq. There’s no indication that Trump intends to do the same even though, unlike in 2003, the president’s party controls both chambers.

 

Legally, this isn’t complicated. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 asserts that the commander-in-chief can lawfully send the military into battle “only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” None of that is true with respect to Iran, even if some Iran hawks point to existing war-on-terror authorizations of force to give the president cover. To believe that Trump enjoys inherent constitutional authority to deploy the troops anyway, you need to pretend that the power to declare war that was given to Congress, not to the executive, by Article I, Section 8 simply doesn’t exist.

 

There are efforts afoot in the House and Senate to stop him. Democrat Tim Kaine is introducing a resolution in the upper chamber that would bar war with Iran without Congress’ approval while Republican Thomas Massie is doing the same in the lower one. There are enough Republican doves in both chambers to give those resolutions a shot at passage (although not nearly enough to override an inevitable Trump veto). Even if they fail, it’s possible that the vote in favor of each resolution will be bipartisan while the vote against them won’t be.

 

That’s a bad starting point politically for Trump in trying to rally the public behind a military intervention that’s already unpopular. If you think Americans are jittery now about the president’s autocratic tendencies, wait until he starts bombing Iran with members of Congress from both sides of the aisle screaming at him to stop.

 

Trump tore up Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

 

There isn’t a single right-wing war critic, even among the Tuckerites and Bannonistas, who’ll dare fault Trump for having withdrawn during his first term from the nuclear deal with Iran that Barack Obama negotiated in 2015. To do so would be the highest form of partisan treason. Remember, one of modern Republicans’ core beliefs is that government by the right, however sleazy, stupid, illiberal, and malign, is always preferable to government by the left.

 

But the rest of the country doesn’t believe that. If Trump attacks Iran, Democrats and independents will make great hay of the fact that the president might have avoided this mess if only he’d swallowed his pride and stuck with the bargain struck by Obama. Already graphics are circulating illustrating that Iran didn’t begin building out its capabilities to enrich uranium until after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal in May 2018. The president has a chicken-and-egg problem: Would the Iranians be stockpiling fissile material right now, forcing him to decide whether to bomb, if he hadn’t spooked them by seeming so belligerent during his first four years in office?

 

It would be one thing, perhaps, if Trump believed that negotiating with a regime that preaches “death to America” is pointless by definition. He doesn’t. Not only was he knee-deep in brokering his own nuclear deal with Iran recently, the Israelis feared that he’d succeed and get rolled in the process. “Privately, they fretted that Mr. Trump would take what they viewed as an inadequate deal with Iran, similar to the 2015 deal negotiated by President Barack Obama, and that he would then declare mission accomplished,” the Times reported.

 

If he had been true to his dovish instincts from the start in dealing with Iran, his critics will say, we might not be on the brink of war. Instead, he’s piling one hawkish tough-guy blunder on top of another.

 

Bombing won’t solve the problem.

 

There’s a second chicken-and-egg problem. Realistically, how many times are we going to need to destroy Iran’s enrichment program?

 

The strategic case for building nuclear weapons is that nothing else is as capable of reliably discouraging attacks by enemies with superior conventional power. Ironically, Israel’s bombing campaign has now strengthened that case for Iran; the U.S. joining in would strengthen it further. Iran’s proxies have been pulverized and its own military has performed dismally this past week. If it wants to prevent a rerun of the humiliation it’s currently enduring at some point in the future, it’ll need a nuclear deterrent to make the Israelis think twice.

 

A senior U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal that, so far, Israeli strikes have set back the Iranian nuclear program by only five or six months. Other experts estimate that a successful bombing campaign might delay the country’s development of a bomb by two years. If that’s true then even if Donald Trump goes full hawk and takes out the Fordow site, he might find himself back in the position he’s in now before his term is up.

 

The only permanent solution is replacing the current clerical regime with one friendlier to the United States and Israel, but even hawks as staunch as Nikki Haley are leery of the costs involved in that. So if the president attacks, he’d better be prepared to explain how attacking has supposedly “solved” the problem. Realistically, will bombing Iran make the mullahs more amenable to denuclearizing voluntarily—or less? Do we trust them not to develop nuclear weapons covertly if an agreement to that end is struck?

 

Trump’s dovish deputies might quit in protest.

 

A comic subplot to the drama in the skies over Iran is that the president is furious at his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

 

Allegedly. According to Politico, Trump flipped his wig after she released that wacky video last week warning of another Hiroshima if “warmongers” continued to stir things up between nuclear powers. The president interpreted that (correctly) as an attempt to rally Americans preemptively against him joining a conflict between Israel and Iran. But the discord runs deeper: He believes Gabbard “doesn’t add anything to any conversation,” per one Politico source, and—amazingly—she didn’t attend the big war huddle at Camp David on June 8. Last week, when reminded by reporters of her assessment that Iran isn’t building nukes, he bluntly declared, “I don’t care what she said.”

 

Supposedly he’s even considering dissolving the office of the director of national intelligence and assigning its duties to some other agency. Fun stuff. But maybe not for long.

 

Gabbard resigning in protest of a U.S. attack on Iran would give political juice to war opponents on both sides. For Democrats, it would be a gift-wrapped talking point that Trump’s foreign policy is so FUBAR that one of his own Cabinet members can’t condone it by carrying it out. The president dislikes giving his enemies “scalps”; Tulsi might present her own scalp to the anti-war left, perhaps even admitting that her old progressive comrades were right that the GOP is incorrigibly warlike. That would be embarrassing for everyone involved, although mostly for Trump.

 

Her resignation might also give courage to the Tuckerites and Bannonistas of the isolationist right, though. It would set an example that policy, not personal loyalty to the president, should be paramount to “America Firsters” even at the highest levels of the government. That wouldn’t incite a MAGA rebellion, but it might help establish dovishness as a political hill worth dying on for populists as the post-Trump era approaches.

 

Anti-Trump partisans are primed to attack.

 

There’s a universe in which America is led by a president who’s been conciliatory to his critics and is poised to receive the benefit of the doubt from them about attacking Iran.

 

This is not that universe.

 

For many reasons besides the sheer joy of punching a bully, the left will relish flogging Trump if he joins Israel’s campaign and the war goes sideways. Start with expediency: Democrats are momentarily as irrelevant as either of the two major parties have been in my lifetime and desperate to find an issue that will gain traction. The Big Beautiful Bill looks promising but fiscal policy is gassy and might be hard for many voters to noodle. A fiasco in Iran, by contrast, could hit them right in the gut.

 

Tying Trump to Israel would also be fruitful politically. Many months of war in Gaza have led to the narrowest gap between Americans sympathetic to Israel and those sympathetic to Palestinians in the history of Quinnipiac’s polling. The left has despised Netanyahu for ages for confounding U.S. diplomacy in the region, especially toward Iran; now, thanks to Gaza, a whole lot of other Americans are open to the possibility that they were right to hate him. A bad outcome in the current war might encourage them to seize that opening and to blame the president for enabling Bibi’s bellicosity.

 

And an Iran “quagmire” would give Democrats a chance to rebuild their brand as the true anti-war party in the United States. They’ve spent 10 years watching Trump muscle in on their ideological turf, from vowing to protect the welfare state to wooing Big Labor to, of all things, denouncing “endless wars” in the Middle East. He stole their act and did quite well for himself electorally by doing so. Now they might steal it back by flaming him as a hypocrite who, in attacking the region’s great Shiite power, crossed a line that even George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan were careful to observe.

 

“No Trump war in Iran”: At a moment of disarray, that’s a slogan leftists of all stripes can unify behind. God willing, they’ll even entice a few of the more hardcore postliberal right-wing peaceniks to horseshoe their way into joining the other party. They can have them.