It’s Never a Bad Time to Level with the American People

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

 

If you’re a Republican, much less a self-described MAGA voter, you don’t need to be persuaded to support the war against the theocratic regime in Tehran.

 

Fox News’s polling found that 84 percent of registered voters who identify as Republican support the war. Eighty-five percent of Republicans surveyed by CBS News’s pollsters said the same. NBC News’s survey discovered something similar. Seventy-seven percent of GOP voters in its poll backed the strikes on Iranian regime targets, including an overwhelming 90 percent of “MAGA” Republicans.

 

Republicans like Senator Josh Hawley, who has committed himself to convincing the GOP that Donald Trump must declare victory and retreat now before the war inevitably goes south, may be fighting an uphill political battle. But he’s banking that Republicans will eventually adopt the view shared primarily by Democrats and independents, most of whom are skeptical of the war.

 

Honestly, it’s hard to blame those who do not quite understand the goals that the U.S. and Israel are pursuing in the skies over Iran. The White House has not communicated what victory looks like, how it will be achieved, or what is expected of the American public. The president hasn’t trusted the American people enough to level with them. That mistrust is, it seems, mutual. The president owed it to the public to enlist them in what is, after all, a national project of paramount importance.

 

Here, Trump is repeating Joe Biden’s mistake. “Defending freedom will have costs,” Biden informed the American public at the outset of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. “We need to be honest about that.” But Biden did not elaborate on what the American public would be asked to endure for that cause. Rather, he emphasized the “robust action” he would take to “limit the pain the American people are feeling at the gas pump.”

 

Biden at least solicited the public’s support for the West’s contributions to the war to preserve Ukraine’s independence. To some extent, he had no choice. Americans needed a primer from the president on why it was in America’s interest to back Kyiv’s defense against Moscow’s aggression. By contrast, the American voting public needs no education from Trump on the nature of the Iranian threat. The same polling that indicates voters are trepidatious about this campaign also shows that the public recognizes Iran is a threat to the United States, and some surveys indicate that a short war to overthrow the Islamist regime would be overwhelmingly popular.

 

Maybe Trump thought that he didn’t need to ask voters to endorse a broader and longer campaign — one that would cost American lives and result in hardships that every citizen would be expected to endure. But he does. It’s never too late to correct that oversight. Late-night social media posts in which the president presents the public with selectively curated snippets of good news from the front just won’t do.

 

Trump should respect voters’ intelligence enough to be honest with them about the stakes of this campaign, and solicit their patience when, not if, the plan U.S. tacticians took into this fight fails to survive extended contact with the enemy. He will need Americans’ forbearance sooner rather than later.