|
 |
Don’t look now, but Brent crude is suddenly pushing $100 a barrel again. Happy Thursday.
Now’s the time to try out a Bulwark+ membership. Get access to members-only newsletters and podcasts, and join the community in the comments FREE for two weeks. Join us.
 |
Support Our Troops by Ending Trump’s War
by William Kristol
Yesterday, President Trump traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to attend the dignified transfer ceremony for the four young American soldiers killed last weekend in the war he started almost five months ago.
But Donald Trump doesn’t do dignified. And so as he departed the White House, he couldn’t resist enlisting these fallen soldiers to the cause of justifying his failing war. “All of them said very strongly, ‘We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.’”
After the ceremony, Trump flew to a political rally in Georgia. There, in the course of his rambling remarks, he called his war—a war in which eighteen service members have died and hundreds have been wounded, a war that has cost us tens of billions of dollars and that is now expanding and escalating daily—a “skirmish.”
Trump explained his use of the term: “I call it a skirmish. This skirmish we have with the Islamic Republic of Iran, and I call it that because let me tell you, they’re getting hit so hard, they want to make a deal. . . . They’re not ready, they’ll be ready very soon.”
Needless to say, there is no more evidence that Trump is telling the truth about the intentions of the rulers of Iran than that he was telling the truth about the views of the fallen American soldiers.
Meanwhile yesterday, as Trump was talking, the House of Representatives was voting. The House passed along party lines a budget resolution that allocated $73 billion of new spending for Trump’s “skirmish.”
So the Republican House’s final major vote before heading home for a five-week break was to fund the war.
And the war is strikingly unpopular. For example, a new Fox News survey shows only 34 percent of registered voters approving of Trump’s handling of Iran, with 66 percent disapproving. A more detailed University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll confirms that the American public wants this war to end. Fifty-two percent of all respondents—including 76 percent of Democrats, 65 percent of independents, and even 23 percent of Republicans—say that the United States should end the war with Iran now. Only 24 percent of all respondents say the United States should undertake military actions whenever the White House deems necessary.
And 58 percent of Americans say the Iran war has impacted American interests more negatively than positively. Only 12 percent of Americans say the reverse. Even a plurality of Republicans say the war’s impact has been net negative (by 32 percent to 27 percent).
The analysis of the University of Maryland survey concludes, “the public’s preference for the war to end now is divorced from any objectives the Trump administration has used as a justification. The public wants the war to end now even without achieving any unachieved objectives. . . . None of the justifications for war are landing.”
So Republicans will be going home for the August recess having to defend an unpopular war on which they have just voted to spend tens of billions more dollars. This won’t be an easy sell. And Republicans are already trailing in the generic congressional ballot—by six points in the new Eco