The Pre-War World Is Gone

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, March 19, 2026

 

So far, the data do not suggest that Republicans lack the stomach for challenging the status quo in the Middle East.

 

If America’s objective over the skies of Iran is to neutralize Iran’s power-projection capabilities, the war has opened up the prospect of a secondary objective at home: a “purge,” as Michael Brendan Dougherty put it, of right-wing iconoclasts and dissidents from Donald Trump’s coalition.

 

The establishmentarian types who never sought such company in the first place are busily expelling from Trump’s “core base” anyone discomfited by the war, he maintains. And all amid a perverse pageant in which the likes of Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, the fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, and other critics of the president’s actions over the years nevertheless support him in this national endeavor. Presumably, they should have observed a mulish consistency and opposed a war they’ve long supported because Trump is its prosecutor.

 

Indeed, rather than celebrate former counterterrorism czar Joe Kent’s resignation, Michael alleges, the establishmentarians “became even angrier” over it. One is indeed liable to encounter a mix of emotions when confronted with the fact that the nation’s onetime lead counterterrorism official is apparently beholden to a variety of fantastical antisemitic conspiracy theories. His self-expulsion from public life notwithstanding, though, Michael sees Kent’s departure from government as indicative of how the “isolationists and restrainers and prioritizers” are forever subject to a campaign of character assassination and perpetual discreditation.

 

Leave aside the relative pro-Trump credentials of the conservative internationalists at whom MBD sneers, or the desirability of removing from the security community’s ranks those who cannot distinguish America’s allies from its enemies; it’s not clear from the polling that the “core base” of Trump’s movement is being expurgated by, well, anyone. Rather, critics of the war seem to be eagerly marginalizing themselves:

 

 

You’d be hard-pressed to find a poll in which self-described “MAGA” voters are not four-square behind this war — a subset within the larger GOP and GOP-leaning voting base, the majority of whom are also supportive of the war. As the New York Post reported today of just one recent poll, Republican voters prefer Trump’s judgment on foreign affairs (85 percent) to the dissident podcasters who have been relentlessly critical of the war with Iran (6 percent).

 

Why is that so hard to believe? Not only has Donald Trump proven repeatedly that “MAGA” is whatever he says it is, the longtime Republicans who have not fallen under Trump’s spell but still support the war do so because they are products of almost a half-century of history in which Iran has been an avowed and blood-soaked enemy of the United States.

 

The “restrainers” are right to be self-conscious. They spent the last year advocating pathological hostility toward America’s NATO allies, insisting that Europe should focus on Europe and contending that the alliance should not conduct out-of-theater operations. They did that while promoting doctrinal revisions to American grand strategy that would lead the United States to retreat into its own hemisphere, leaving the world to its devices. That sure seems shortsighted today. And it was Donald Trump — not some nebulous cabal of interventionists — who proved how foolish it was.

 

Yet, as Michael notes, drilling down into the polling of all Republicans (I thought we were talking about the “core base?”) reveals a rising level of trepidation among GOP voters over the course the war is taking. Here, Michael has a point.

 

The public is understandably apprehensive over even a small ground operation to take, for example, the islands in the Persian Gulf that Iran uses as transshipment hubs for oil to unlock the Strait of Hormuz. It doesn’t help that some Republicans, as he notes, are spinning voters by claiming that putting U.S. troops on Iranian soil does not constitute “boots on the ground.” That’s akin to insisting that this war isn’t a “war” at all.

 

Voters’ concerns are heightened, not alleviated, by the linguistic games Republicans are playing amid their poorly concealed fears that the war and its accompanying financial disruptions will doom the GOP at the polls in November. Like the “isolationists and restrainers and prioritizers,” though, they are clinging to the pre-war world that has already passed away.

 

There is no going back to the world as it was before February 28. Under fire from the Iranian field commanders independently targeting the region’s civilian infrastructure, the Gulf states are lobbying Washington not to halt the war but to see it through to a determinative conclusion. The Iranian regime has made it clear that it, not Israel or America, is the acute threat to the region. The regime itself has been hollowed out. For however long it survives in the postwar world, if it survives at all, it will need to be contained so that the regime will implode rather than explode. The application of U.S. hard power will compel American lawmakers to ensure the speedy replenishment of its stocks of exquisite stand-off munitions — nothing spurs production like consumption.

 

These are all long-term commitments. Michael believes that they are destined to be unpopular, perhaps even more unpopular than the already unpopular war against the Islamic Republic. But the risk these conditions pose to the Republican Party’s immediate political fortunes pales before the prospects for the future they might unleash.

 

It’s only because we’ve gotten very good at it that Americans don’t know how much time, energy, and resources the United States devotes around the clock to preventing Iranian regime elements and their proxies from killing as many of us as they can. Since the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Islamic Republic has been the locus of instability in the Middle East — the primary obstacle preventing America from executing that “pivot to Asia.” The pre-war world was already a costly world, but those costs were baked into a suboptimal status quo that few had the resolve to challenge.

 

This war is hastening the realization of the vision for the region heralded by the Abraham Accords. Success in that project is not assured, but America’s participation in it is. So far, the data do not suggest that Republicans lack the stomach for that endeavor.

 

There’s a simple reason for that. Among Republicans, the polling has long demonstrated that there is no internal contradiction that Donald Trump’s advocacy cannot paper over. His coalition was never something anyone else could control. As such, it was also destined to become unstable after 2024 — the last time Trump’s name would ever grace the top of a ballot.

 

Political coalitions in America are impermanent things. And Republicans have reason to worry that most American voters, burdened by high prices and unclear on the war’s objectives, would punish the GOP at the ballot box. But the polling also suggests that Republican voters are not succumbing to fatalism along with the rest of the electorate.

 

If the Trump coalition cracks up over the war, it will not be because the MAGA right abandoned the president or the squishy establishmentarians got weak in the knees. At least, that’s not happening yet. What is happening is that those with a loose attachment to the GOP, unenthusiastic voters, or even independents who are persuaded by Democratic messaging are running for the exits.

 

Those are the voters who contribute at the margins to a victorious national electoral coalition, but they are not Trump’s “core base.” Those who believe that they represent the purest version of the “MAGA” right might reflect on that when they presume to speak for the voters that only Trump himself commands.

The Israel Hoax

By Rich Lowry

Friday, March 20, 2026

 

We’ve long known that Donald Trump drives his critics crazy, and he’s now doing it to some critics who used to be his friends.

 

The isolationist right is convinced that President Trump is waging the Iran War on Israel’s behalf, which would make him the handmaiden of a foreign power.

 

That should be a familiar-sounding charge, since Democrats and the legacy media spent most of Trump’s first term making the same accusation, except the foreign puppeteer was Russia rather than Israel.

 

Now, “Russia, Russia, Russia,” as Trump often puts it, has become, “Israel, Israel, Israel.”

 

All of this is misbegotten, first and foremost, because we have never had a president who is so thoroughly his own man as Donald Trump. Good luck trying to control him, as so many advisers and consultants have learned over the years. There are very few things he’s done as president where you’ve thought, “Oh, that’s so unlike him.”

 

That includes firing FBI Director James Comey in his first term, one of the main counts against him during the Russia frenzy, and launching the war against Iran today.

 

Going back 50 years, no one would have been shocked to learn that a nationalistic American president obsessed with strength had bombed Iran. Trump is just such a figure, and sure enough, he’s bombed Iran twice in his second term.

 

Trump has made bellicose statements about Iran since 1980, and despite all his contradictory statements during this war, nothing we’ve heard suggests anything other than that he genuinely relishes killing Iran’s leaders and destroying its weapons.

 

Temperamentally, Trump loves exercising power, always wants to do it on his own authority, and seeks to preserve his options. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that as commander in chief of the world’s most proficient military, he’s been drawn to using and threatening force.

 

Israel didn’t talk Trump into conducting his Venezuela raid, or menacing Denmark over Greenland, or looking to Cuba as his next potential target.

 

One argument, based on a distortion of remarks made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the outset of the war, is that Israel forced Trump’s hand; it was going to attack Iran no matter what, and we knew U.S. personnel would be hit by Iran in response and would be particularly vulnerable if we didn’t hit Iran as well.

 

Trump therefore had no choice. Check and mate, Bibi Netanyahu.

 

The idea, though, that Trump was too sheepish to stay Netanyahu’s hand if the Israeli prime minister was about to launch a military operation that Trump opposed and was going to jeopardize American lives is preposterous.

 

Trump has been happy to say no to Netanyahu before. He pressured the Israeli leader into turning back planes at the end of the Twelve-Day War last June.

 

By alleging that Israel forced the U.S. into war, the isolationists think they are making a harsh criticism of the Jewish state, but more than anything, they are damning Donald Trump. What worse offense can a president of the United States commit than subjugating his own nation to a foreign power? It’s a treasonous act that deserves eternal infamy and impeachment and removal.

 

This is exactly why the Russia obsessives so delighted in believing that Trump was a tool of the Kremlin.

 

Most of the right-wing dissenters blanch at following their own logic. An alternative tack — seen in intelligence official Joe Kent’s resignation letter — is to argue that Trump was simply fooled. Kent said there was “a misinformation campaign” that “sowed pro-war sentiments,” and that “this echo chamber was used to deceive” the president.

 

This argument is still a stinging condemnation. It paints Trump as an easily manipulated naïf, and on a highly consequential matter of war and peace. In reality, there was no broad-ranging media drumbeat for war and no wave of popular support for one. This, again, emphasizes how the decision was Trump’s, and his alone.

 

The Russia hoax was, in part, driven by the left’s shock and disappointment at Trump’s victory in 2016. Likewise, the isolationists are having trouble processing the fact that the president in whom they invested so much has launched a major war in the Middle East.

 

But Trump was not owned by this faction of the right, any more than he is owned by Israel.

Kathy Hochul’s Seller’s Remorse

National Review Online

Friday, March 20, 2026

 

Back in 2022, Hochul built upon the work of her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, in making the case that Republicans were unwelcome in the Empire State. “Just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong, okay,” Hochul said of her gubernatorial opponent, Lee Zeldin, among others. “Get out of town because you don’t represent our values. You’re not New Yorkers.”

 

Evidently, her audience was paying attention, for, between 2022 and today, around 250,000 New Yorkers did as Hochul asked, and headed down to Florida where they belonged. Given the vehemence with which she issued her order, one might have assumed that this development would have filled the governor with joy. But one would have been wrong. Indeed, far from celebrating the exodus, Hochul now sounds as if she is on the verge of putting together a modern Lewis and Clark Expedition tasked with bringing them back. “The fact is,” she said this week, “I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs that we want to have in our state.” That being so, she is urging the New Yorkers who stayed to go down to the Sunshine State, rummage around in the homes and gardens of Palm Beach, Naples, and Miami, and “see who you can bring back home, because our tax base has been eroded.” New York, Hochul concluded, is “in competition with other states who have less of a tax burden on their corporations and their individuals.” Apparently, that competition is not going especially well.

 

It may not have escaped the notice of New York taxpayers that the state’s budget is twice that of Florida, despite the latter having a larger population. Indeed, Mayor Zohran Mamdani proposes to spend more money in New York City’s local government than the entire Florida budget, and that on top of state spending. Hence, the endless appetite for taxes.

 

Hochul’s plea is notable for many reasons, but none so galling as that she appears sincerely to believe that America’s citizenry works for her. If anyone has a patriotic obligation to the State of New York, it is not those Americans who choose to live in other states. In Hochul’s mind, “generous social programs” are self-evidently virtuous. And yet, clearly, not everyone feels the same way. Ultimately, politics involves trade-offs, and for a considerable number of Americans, the judgments being made in Albany are less attractive than those that are being made in Tallahassee, Austin, and elsewhere. In a particularly embarrassing turn of phrase, Hochul demanded that rich families ought simply to “cut me the checks.” But they don’t want to. And who could blame them? As pitches go, there are few that could do with more improvement than, Hey, non-New Yorker. You don’t belong here! Now pay me lots of money for the dysfunctional government I run.

 

More than anything else, Governor Hochul’s about-face betrays an intellectual exhaustion within the progressive movement. Granted, nobody is likely to mistake Kathy Hochul for a scholar or a wit. But, at the very least, one would expect the governor of New York to be able to make a case for social democracy that does not sound as if it has been sourced from the minutes of the East German Council of Ministers. Now, as in the past, Americans are permitted to move around within their own country. This is not a flaw, or a problem, or a loophole; it is one of the core features of our constitutional order. Over time, this arrangement has facilitated the creation of different sorts of states under the same national flag: some with high taxes and bigger governments, others with lower taxes and smaller governments. As conservatives, we are not agnostic on the question of which is preferable. But even we understand that there is a better case for the high-tax model than “hand over the cash, you traitor.” That Kathy Hochul has been so profoundly incapable of making it suggests that the model she is championing is finally breaking down.

 

Internal migration is a complicated topic, but, by and large, the trends tell us a clean and useful tale. It is possible that a given person or family might act irrationally when relocating; it is far less possible that hundreds of thousands will. Over the last decade, millions of Americans have voted with their feet, and, in the vast majority of cases, they have abandoned the sclerotic big-government model in favor of more frugal climes. If Governor Hochul wishes to reverse this seemingly inexorable course, she will have to amend her ways. That will mean less cajoling and berating, and more learning and understanding. It’s up to you, New York.

Against Misery

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, March 19, 2026

 

‘Cheer up,” the British like to say. “It might never happen.”

 

To which the comedian Jack Dee once retorted: “Actually, I think you can tell by the chisel coming out of my knee that, on this occasion, it has in fact happened.”

 

If, indeed, you have a chisel coming out of your knee, what follows is not for you. At no point in human history would a man with a chisel sticking out of his body have been expected to stop being miserable, and there is nothing about our age that ought to alter that expectation. Now, as ever, a chisel in the knee serves as a presumptive Get Out of Happiness Free card, whose holders may moan, complain, grumble, cavil, and bitch to their heart’s content.

 

But the rest of us? Could we perhaps dial down our angst just a little? If, as is mercifully common, you have been spared one of the handful of genuine problems that your grandparents might have recognized as such, then “Cheer up” is pretty solid advice, all told. I know, I know. You don’t like the president? Neither do I. And you wish that some of the laws that bind you were different? Me too. And you think that things could be better than they are? You’re right. They could. But is that really a reason to be so down on your country? Surely one doesn’t need to be a Stoic to conclude that doom and gloom are to be avoided until avoiding them proves impossible rather than embraced as a lifestyle choice.

 

And yet, for quite some time now, the default mood of our politics has been depressed, even as Americans remain pretty darn happy with how things are going for them personally. Per Gallup, 81 percent of Americans are either “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with their lives, while just 20 percent are either “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with the way things are going in the United States in general. And why wouldn’t they be, when, day in and day out, our leaders declaim and condemn and lament the awful state of things. They point to the dastardly villains who are screwing us; cite figures that suggest that our lifestyles are precarious; deliver rhetoric designed to make us believe that we are unfortunate; and, increasingly as a matter of habit, look backward rather than forward when waxing lyrical about the American dream. When, rarely, one hears optimism, it is laden with caveats: The United States could be great, if only it were altered wholesale. Our future would be bright, if only those who disagree with us were vanquished for all time. If only this politician were to win, or this one policy were to be passed into law, or this one constitutional change were to be made, then we might attain the sunlit uplands that our forefathers promised us.

 

I think that this inclination is bonkers. The United States has many problems at present. But this was also true in 1980, 1950, 1920, 1890, and at each and every earlier juncture. Pick a date at random since 1776, and one will invariably discover all manner of cultural, social, political, and economic issues attached to it. Why? Because America is run by people, and because people are flawed. Because there are no solutions in statecraft, only trade-offs. Because democracy is a process, not a guarantee of perfection. It is, of course, virtuous for a free people to attempt to improve the country they inherited. But it is a grave mistake to believe that anything short of the establishment of heaven on earth represents failure. What we have in the United States right now — it’s not a matter of if or when or after or before, but right now — is a miracle. This country — as it is. This economy — as it is. This culture — as it is. This constitutional order — as it is.

 

A baby who is born in America today would have been envied by pretty much every other human being who came before. Without having done anything to earn it, that baby is the beneficiary of thousands of years’ worth of other people’s effort, experimentation, and pain. For that baby to grow up and look around this country and disdain all that he sees would be ungrateful. But for the political class to cultivate such a sentiment? That is a sin. Having strong political views does not require one to descend into despair. As a polity, we appear to have forgotten that.

 

***

 

Lest I be accused of Pollyannaism, allow me to list the major challenges we face. The federal government is massively in debt, spends more than it takes in each year, and has no plan to reverse this trend. Our entitlement programs are unaffordable but cannot be touched for fear of angering the electorate. We are still suffering the lingering effects of the worst bout of inflation in 40 years. The housing market remains too expensive for many, and interest rates, while historically normal, are higher than they have been for two decades. China is a serious geopolitical threat that is arguably on the same scale as that once posed by the Soviet Union. Our higher-education system has left millions of students in debt but without the prospects that they believed would be unlocked by incurring that debt. Our K–12 education system is, in many areas, producing students who can’t read, write, count, or think straight. And mass immigration — which has been turbocharged by a persistent unwillingness to enforce our laws — has left many voters angry and unsettled.

 

These challenges are all real, and they are all serious. But ’twas ever thus. Fire up the random date selector again and consider a decade that you are tempted to romanticize. The 1990s? Fun, except that crime was higher than at any point in the 20th century. The 1980s? Great, except that everyone was scared of an imminent thermonuclear war, and the abortion rate was astronomical. The 1970s? Nice, except for stagflation, oil crises, Watergate, and the rocketing number of divorces. The 1960s? Exciting, except for the political assassinations, race riots, domestic terrorism, Vietnam War, and Cuban Missile Crisis. Yes, in hindsight, we know that most of these problems were solved or reduced. But the people living through them did not know that they would be. And, not knowing that, they faced the same alternatives that we do: to understand — to acknowledge — that the United States is great in spite of its issues or to collapse into nihilism.

 

I am not making the case here for a given president or party. Indeed, given the low quality of our current crop of politicians — including, for two decades now, our commanders in chief — I will not pretend to be upset that Americans have given low marks to their leaders since at least the late 1990s. Still, I will confess to being a touch worried that the electorate has adopted a worldview that renders satisfaction philosophically unattainable. Ultimately, the split between the Americans who are satisfied with their own lives (81 percent) and the Americans who are satisfied with the state of their country (20 percent) is absurd. Americans live in America. Certainly, life is more than mere politics, but if “the way things are going” in America really were unsatisfactory to a supermajority, one would not expect that same supermajority to say that their personal lives were A-OK. Given the considerable size of the gap, it seems likely that, when asked about “the country,” most people are answering on behalf of other supposedly unhappy people — many of whom probably do not exist. Logically, it is possible for 80 percent of the population to believe that their lives are good and to be so worried about the fate of the minority that they hold a negative opinion of the country as a whole. But I am skeptical that this is what is actually going on. All things considered, it seems far more probable that, egged on by commentators, journalists, and politicians, Americans have become convinced that, outside of their own enclaves, the United States is a hellscape.

 

***

 

Which is a problem because, in the year of our Lord 2026, the United States is no such thing. In fact, it is the best place in the world by far. It has a durable constitutional order that, more than two centuries since it was ratified, continues to protect individual rights to an extent that remains unique in the West. It has the largest and most dynamic economy and the highest standard of living of any large nation. It has the most impressive higher-education sector; the best scientists, engineers, and doctors; and the lion’s share of the global technology industry. It boasts massive natural resources, including enough oil to remain energy-independent, vast tracts of arable land, and abundant fresh water. It has the most fearsome military, the world’s reserve currency, and the most important financial markets on earth.

 

Better still, most trends are in America’s favor. In 2008, the combined economies of the EU slightly exceeded the economy of the United States. Today, the United States’ economy is one and a half times the size of the EU’s. In 1990, the United States’ share of the global stock market was 30 percent. Today, that share is 65 percent. In 1980, the United States imported 40 percent of its petroleum. Today, it is the world’s largest producer of oil and a net exporter of energy. And, of course, the United States’ ability to project military power remains unmatched.

 

These advantages do not wipe out the challenges that the U.S. faces. But they do prompt the question, “As opposed to what?” Or, to put it more bluntly: If the reflexive pose of the American political class is to be melancholy, then what in the name of all that is holy ought the rest of the world to feel? Please believe me when I say that I do not begrudge this Republican and that Democrat their gripes. In a freewheeling republic, the expression of grievances is ubiquitous, inevitable, and sometimes even valuable. But it might be nice if the complainers’ jeremiads were more often interspersed with heartfelt praise for the United States as it actually exists. Negativity sells, no doubt. But there is more to being a statesman than perpetually provoking the citizenry into disgruntlement. After all, if we Americans, of all people, cannot strike a better balance between cheering our country’s successes and addressing its deficiencies, then nobody else has a chance. And despondency has never solved a problem anyway.

 

There have, in the long history of this country, been a handful of years in which remaining optimistic proved a tall order: among them, 1862, when it looked as if the country might split apart; 1930, when the economy was in unprecedented free fall; and 2020, when a once-in-a-century pandemic ground the nation to a halt. We are not living in those years. Rather, we are living in a normal time, facing normal problems, and contriving normal solutions. A century hence, few people will be interested in what happened in 2024 or 2025, and those who do bother to think about it will presumably be confused as to why our conversations about quotidian current affairs were so often eschatological in timbre.

 

William Wordsworth once asked, “Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he / That every man in arms should wish to be?” Today, I might instead ask where the happy warrior is. Despite having been given more than our ancestors could ever have imagined, many of us seem determined to interact with our peers from under a cloud, to pull them in tight so that they, too, end up damp, miserable, and inexplicably despondent about the prospects of the place they call home.

Trumpism: Postmortem of a Mirage

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, March 19, 2026

 

The Trump worshippers of yesterday are now proclaiming Trumpism dead. Christopher Caldwell and others have written articles renouncing Donald Trump for launching the American-Israeli military operation against Iran.

 

They don’t say it, but those of the disenchanted flock have come to realize, in part, what many of us already knew: Trumpism was never alive to begin with.

 

They made it all up.

 

Trump’s early supporters on the intellectual right founded think tanks and publications dedicated to unearthing an “ism” somewhere in the reality star’s grab bag of billionaire bluster, everyman grievance, and showbiz insult. Unsurprisingly, they emerged with exactly what they wanted to see.

 

This was mostly a negative agenda, focused not on regeneration but rejection. Trumpism was supposed to reject liberal social engineering, conservative fiscal restraint, neoconservative hawkishness, and neoliberal free markets.

 

In other words, whatever competing political ideas were in circulation before Trump took office would be wiped from the menu. As Caldwell puts it in the Spectator, “The Trump movement is what happened when Americans discovered the system could not be reformed democratically, only dismantled.” Which goes to show that the inventors of Trumpism were already developing the adolescent’s attraction to revolution.

 

As for their positive wish list, to varying degrees, some wanted nativism, isolationism, industrial policy, and—incredibly, considering who Trump is—a return to traditional mores.

 

Occasionally their fantasies aligned with Trump’s policies. Other times, he humored them. And sometimes, they were worlds apart. But Trump was able to smooth it all over with populist appeals to deep-state conspiracies and battle cries against the establishment.

 

Trump’s first term foundered in the Covid pandemic, and the whole country would go on to suffer an extended psychotic episode that stretched into the presidency of Joe Biden.

 

But something interesting happened during those years of national madness. The institutional abuses of the pandemic made the Trumpists crazier and more radical, while Trump himself—who had to run a gauntlet of legal fights, brushes with death, and reelection to the White House—came through with an unforeseen ability to focus squarely, simplistically even, on national problem-solving.

 

Trump’s second term would be a redo, and the only revolution he wanted would be one of “common sense.” Our unprotected border was a problem. It was common sense that we secure it. DEI indoctrination was a problem. Common sense dictated that we get rid of it. On it went. It’s common sense that there are two sexes, that those illegally residing in the United States need to leave, that the federal government wastes billions on ridiculous schemes, and that American cities should be safe from criminals.

 

Finally, of course, it’s common sense to use the world’s most formidable military to take out the most dangerous enemies of the United States. And that was just too much common sense for the Trumpists. Unlike Trump, they came out of the pandemic delirium as chronic conspiracy theorists with a full-blown case of anti-Semitism. If fighting Iran meant partnering with the Jewish state, they were done.

 

So done they are. Unlike Trumpism, MAGA lives. It’s what it’s always been: whatever Trump says it is. And polls show that MAGA’s share of the right is larger and more supportive of Trump than it was a year ago.

 

Caldwell describes Trumpism as Trump’s movement. But it’s not and never was. It was the invention of thinkers, journalists, and performers who sought to justify their support for Trump as something more sophisticated than it seemed, something more sophisticated than Trump could ever be bothered with. They supported Trump because they liked the idea of tearing it all down. That movement—their movement—is, in fact, dead.

That Was Before October 7

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, March 19, 2026

 

Alot of confusion over Israel’s aggressive strategy along its borders can be cleared up with the following statement: That was before October 7.

 

For example: Why is Israel going so far into Lebanon with plans to hold territory for as long as it takes until Hezbollah is disarmed? In the past, Israel has never directed the evacuation of so many Lebanese villages or insisted the residents of those towns would be kept from returning until Israel’s objectives were completed.

 

Well, that was before October 7.

 

Reuters reports that the French government wants Israel to agree to a cease-fire before requiring Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah, but Israel is resisting. The French are no doubt reminding the Israelis that that is the order in which those tasks were handled in the past.

 

To which Israel might reply: Well, that was before October 7. Now we know better. Now we want to make sure the job is done. Now we understand that we have to prevent villagers from South Lebanon from returning to their homes because otherwise Hezbollah rockets will stop Israeli civilians from being able to move back to their own homes.

 

Reuters also says Israel is wary of being pulled into fruitless negotiations: “Israel has rebuffed an offer of direct talks from Beirut as too little, too late by a government that shares its goal of wanting Hezbollah disarmed but fears that acting against it could risk civil war, sources familiar with the situation said.”

 

Again, “too late” here means after October 7.

 

For some reason, the world still hasn’t quite grasped how much has changed since that day, at least for Israelis. One reason is the terrifying “what if” that Israeli policymakers have had to ask themselves: What if Hezbollah had invaded along with Hamas on October 7, when Israel’s defenses were down and it had to fight to regain territory within its own borders?

 

What if Hamas’s control of the highway near the Gaza Envelope meant a Lebanese convoy could be on the scene within two hours? By many accounts, it took IDF units twice as long to reach Kibbutz Be’eri that day.

 

Even without the prospect of an actual Hezbollah ground invasion, consider: Hamas pushed Israel’s border residents into retreat, essentially moving the border itself for a brief period. Hezbollah periodically forces the same effect on residents of the north just by using rockets. And while both of those groups were working to herd Israelis into the center of the country, Iran was developing the capability to overwhelm Israeli air defenses with its ballistic-missile arsenal.

 

Each of those three threats must be neutralized. There cannot be a force in Gaza able to slaughter communities on the other side of the fence. There cannot be an arsenal in Lebanon that forces the evacuation of Israeli towns. And Iran cannot be allowed to retain or reacquire the means to make the country dwell in bomb shelters.

 

October 7 revealed what can never happen again. That’s why a yellow line divides Gaza. Lebanon is getting its own line, whatever color it ends up being designated.

 

New lines, new rules, new terms—all set by Israel. That’s how this works now.

 

The old rules put Israel’s enemies in a great position to strike at the Jewish state’s vulnerabilities. But, well, that was before October 7. They will not get a second shot at it.

In His Bones

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, March 19, 2026

 

I thought it would take longer than three weeks of war for the “true Trumpism has never been tried” commentary to start flowing.

 

Yesterday brought essays from not one but two MAGA-adjacent writers, Sohrab Ahmari and Christopher Caldwell, pronouncing the Trumpist experiment in its current incarnation a failure. “The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project,” Caldwell observed.

 

Is that so?

 

It sure doesn’t jibe with the polling. A new survey published this morning found Republicans split 83-9 when asked whether they strongly or somewhat support Operation Epic Fury. Another poll conducted earlier this month by Quinnipiac placed GOP approval of how the president has handled the Iran situation at 85-11.

 

Trump has disappointed his base on Iran only if you define his “base” as the postliberal intelligentsia. Caldwell’s claim reminds me of the old jab about how principled conservatism circa 2015 turned out to consist of little more than six guys debating each other in the Weekly Standard break room. In 2026, principled “America First-ism” extends not much further than the contacts list on Tucker Carlson’s iPhone.

 

Still, Ahmari and Caldwell are smart guys who know a looming disaster when they see one. (It might take them 10 years to notice, but they will notice.) The president’s job approval has reached a new low for his second term; reports are swirling that thousands of U.S. infantry might be deployed to secure the coast around the Strait of Hormuz; oil prices surged again last night after new Iranian attacks on Gulf nations’ energy facilities; the cursed word “stagflation” is beginning to creep into economic news.

 

Energy markets might take years to stabilize even if Trump were to end the war today.

 

I assume the president thought that Americans would react to war with Iran the way they react to all political developments, by simply not caring much as long as it doesn’t affect them. And he was probably right. If he had knocked out the regime quickly, without much economic disruption, this intervention would have been another humdrum case of something that happens to other people whose costs can be added to the national credit card and then forgotten about.

 

Not anymore. If you had to wager today on how popular Trumpism will be a year from now, potentially after months of U.S. military casualties, high gas prices, and intractable inflation, you’d be scurrying toward the lifeboats with Caldwell and Ahmari too.

 

What about the president’s base, though? (His actual base, not the one of Caldwell’s imagination.) Trump will hemorrhage independents as the pain inflicted on Americans by the war rises, but it’ll take something more for Republicans to start ditching him in numbers.

 

What if this conflict finally forces the right to reckon with the paradox of Trumpism?

 

The paradox.

 

The paradox of Trumpism is the same paradox at the heart of all authoritarian cults. The leader is omnipotent, in control of events and capable of imposing his iron will on adversaries great and small—but he’s also blameless when things go wrong.

 

He’s the motive force in our universe yet bears no responsibility for its misfortunes. (This is the same conviction many religious believers hold about God, not coincidentally.)

 

The paradox explains why conspiracy theories are popular among the president’s supporters. When a figure like Trump whose persona is based on dominance and indomitability fails in some important way, his followers face a serious crisis of belief. How could a man who’s invincible have lost an election to, of all people, Joe Biden?

 

The answer is that he couldn’t have. The election must have been rigged. Unlike every other losing presidential candidate in American history, this supremely competent figure who somehow wasn’t competent enough to prevent a conspiracy against him from prevailing is blameless for his own defeat.

 

The purest expression of the Trumpist paradox is QAnon, which needed a way during his first term to explain why their hero failed to dismantle the evil child-raping cabal of elites that supposedly runs America. Their solution was “the plan,” the idea that the then-president was working against that cabal but was doing so in covert, barely decipherable ways because he’s such a tactical genius. He was blameless for his failure because he wasn’t actually failing: He was, in fact, in total control of events, and that would become clear to all once he was done executing his “plan.”

 

The Trumpist paradox is how populists cope with the theological question, “Why do bad things happen to good MAGAs?”

 

The war in Iran is a special test of that paradox and not merely because the human and economic stakes are so high. To begin with, it’s a severe challenge to the grassroots right’s belief that the president is blameless for his failures. Not only is he giving the orders that steer the direction of the war, after all, but he’s often keen to remind people of it. “For reasons of decency, I have chosen NOT to wipe out the Oil Infrastructure on [Kharg] Island,” he said last week.

 

First-person singular. It’s not the United States or Americans or the White House or even “we” who are deciding whether Iran’s oil economy lives or dies. It’s him alone, and he means for all of us to know it. Under those circumstances, it’s hard to hold him blameless for the war.

 

The best his apologists can do to try to excuse him is to insist that Israel misled him into attacking, but that’s awfully unflattering to Trump by the standards of populist conspiracy theories. Even if you buy it, you’re left to conclude that he’s a sucker, duped by the wily Benjamin Netanyahu. The best-case scenario for Trumpists if the war deteriorates, in other words, is to accept that their idol is a chump.

 

The other half of the paradox is also rough sledding, though.

 

Losing control.

 

Our omnipotent president seems conspicuously not so omnipotent at the moment.

 

War is a natural proving ground for postliberalism’s belief that all political problems are ultimately due to failures of will. With a supposedly iron-willed leader like Trump in command and an overwhelming advantage in firepower at his disposal, there should be no excuse for America not to impose its will on Iran’s revolutionary regime. Our chief executive has the means and the desire to dominate the enemy and crush its ability to resist.

 

He hasn’t done it. On the contrary. “We clearly just kicked [Iran’s] ass in the field, but, to a large extent, they hold the cards now,” a source close to the White House told Politico this week. “They decide how long we’re involved—and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.” Another source put it this way: “The off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.”

 

As gas prices rise and the White House grasps for a solution to the Hormuz standoff, even a devout QAnon-er would struggle to deny that the president is no longer in control of events. The ultimate proof would be Trump ordering U.S. troops to occupy parts of Iran, a development so grievously politically undesirable that it could only be understood as a desperate measure. But he’s on the verge of doing just that.

 

His public comments about Hormuz’s closure over the past week betray his ambivalence between needing to appear in control of events and needing to appear blameless for the crisis. He complained that America’s European allies weren’t doing anything to help reopen the strait—then, apparently realizing how impotent that made him sound, pivoted to insisting that the U.S. doesn’t need their help. But yesterday he pivoted back and blamed those allies for the strait’s closure again by musing that he might walk away and leave Europe to reopen it since its nations stand to suffer from the impasse more than our energy-rich country does.

 

Convincing Americans in the heartland that Keir Starmer’s faithlessness is why they’re paying $4 per gallon for gas is worth a shot, I suppose. But as long as the strait remains closed, MAGA will be forced to wrestle with the humiliation of Trump having failed to reopen it despite being warned before the war that it might happen.

 

Some twists in the conflict have been so dire that the president seems to want Americans to believe that he’s lost control of events so that they’ll hopefully hold him blameless for what’s happened. Last night he issued an extraordinary statement disclaiming all responsibility for Israel’s strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field. “The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen,” he wrote on Truth Social.

 

That was a lie, according to Axios. Under no circumstances would Israel have blindsided the White House by hitting a target as sensitive as that gas field, knowing how Iran would—and did—retaliate against oil and gas facilities in other Gulf states. Trump approved the strike but hurriedly washed his hands of it afterward because, presumably, he knows his Gulf allies are “furious” at the havoc being wreaked upon their energy industries and likewise knows how furious Americans will be when they discover what that means for global inflation.

 

Forced to choose between having his supporters believe that some of his tactics are futile or destructive on the one hand or that he’s powerless over what’s happening on the other, he opted in this instance for powerlessness. Best of luck to Trump cultists committed to his image of indomitability in navigating that.

 

A glib hawk.

 

As the war’s consequences become more dire, even formerly faithful Trumpists may find themselves choking on the familiar paradox. Is the president a schmuck who was led around by the nose by Mossad? (Gullible yet blameless!) Or is he a schmuck who hatched the plan to go to war without a way to reopen the strait or protect regional oil infrastructure from Iranian attack? (Reckless but fully in charge!)

 

His own intelligence deputies can’t agree.

 

Joe Kent, who led the National Counterterrorism Center until he resigned on Tuesday, is in the “gullible schmuck” camp. “A good deal of key decision makers were not allowed to come and express their opinion to the president,” he told Tucker Carlson in an interview yesterday, describing pre-war deliberations within the West Wing. “There wasn’t a robust debate.” That’s hard to believe, as Trump surely heard J.D. Vance’s concerns about the conflict and reportedly got an earful from Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine about the risks of war generally and the risk to Hormuz in particular.

 

But if you’re eager to exculpate the president for his role in all this, there you go. He’s an insulated old man in the Biden mold whose handlers won’t let dissenting voices get close to him. Quite a legacy.

 

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, is in the “reckless schmuck” camp by contrast. Appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, she was asked whether the agencies under her command agreed with Trump that Iran’s nuclear threat to the United States was “imminent.” Gabbard replied that it’s not for U.S. intelligence to say. “The only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president,” she said, pointing to the volume of information he receives.

 

In other words, no, U.S. intelligence didn’t believe there was an imminent threat, but in this administration the leader alone is in control of events. If you’re eager to be reassured that Donald Trump, not the “deep state,” is in charge of this war, there you go. The president is so totally in command that he’s waging wars even when the deep state tells him he doesn’t need to.

 

The obvious truth about his motives that the “America First” cohort is reluctant to face, and which the paradox of Trumpism helps obscure, comes down to two points. One is that Trump has always been an Iran hawk. The other is that he’s shockingly glib about how he wields power even in matters of life and death.

 

A few days ago an old quote of his surfaced. “I’d do a number on Kharg Island,” he told an interviewer. “I’d go in and take it.” That was in 1988, when I was still in grade school. There are many other examples of him sounding bellicose toward Iran over the decades, as Yair Rosenberg recently recounted, all the way back to calling for U.S. troops to intervene in the Iran hostage crisis in 1980. Christopher Caldwell is welcome to believe that this conflict is some momentous betrayal of Trumpism, but to all appearances the president has been a hardliner on Iran longer than he’s been a hardliner on immigration.

 

As for his strategic thinking: What strategic thinking? “He ended up saying, ‘I just want to do it,’” a source told Axios of how the president answered objections from aides opposed to attacking Iran. “He grossly overestimated his ability to topple the regime short of sending in ground troops.” Pointing to the White House’s quick and painless successes in bombing Iran’s nuclear program and capturing Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro last year, the same source accused Trump of being “high on his own supply” in thinking this war would be similarly easy.

 

It’s really that simple, I think.

 

Believing that it’s more complicated than that, that Israel hypnotized the president into wanting war or whatever, is a bit like believing that the CIA killed JFK or that George W. Bush did 9/11. It’s comforting insofar as it imagines that only a skillful ruse perpetrated by a hyper-competent villain can cause a world-shaking calamity—that someone who knew what he was doing was ultimately in charge of events. But the reality is more disquieting: A single person or small group of people who mean to do harm or are too glibly hubristic to avoid doing it can change everything overnight.

 

Oswald killed Kennedy. A network of Islamist fanatics flew airliners into the World Trade Center. Trump attacked Iran because he wanted the glory of toppling a regime that bedeviled America for most of his life, and he was high enough on his own supply to think the fighting would be over in like three hours.

 

Last week he was asked how he’ll know when the war is over. “When I feel it,” he replied. “When I feel it in my bones.” He meant it, I’m sure. The paradox of omnipotence and blamelessness is designed to make an authoritarian leader’s actions seem logical and comprehensible to admirers when really he’s just acting on impulses that are inscrutable to everyone else.

 

It’s nice to know that what’s “in his bones” is no longer cutting it for all of the Trumpist commentariat, though. Even if it took them 10 years.