President Donald Trump is facing a pivotal challenge: how to complete his joint attacks with Israel on Iran without mass U.S. casualties and before everyday Americans start to feel pain at the gas pump.
Iran is the latest, and most consequential, in a series of foreign interventions the president has undertaken with the aim of getting in and out before Americans suffer tangible consequences.
Trump has made it clear there is no quick off-ramp out of the Middle East. “Combat operations continue at this time,” Trump said in a six-minute video posted to Truth Social on Sunday as conflict in the Middle East escalated. “They will continue until all of our objectives are achieved. We have very strong objectives.”
With a regime change move in Venezuela, Trump managed to skirt American military deaths while aligning with the country’s interim leader to profit off of oil sales. This time in the Middle East, the obstacles ahead for the White House are much more complex than last year’s one-and-done strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities or the capture of the former authoritarian leader of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro.
“Iran isn’t Venezuela,” Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official under the George W. Bush administration who has written books about Iran’s regime, told MS NOW, warning that Trump’s full-scale military assault on Iran “may be a foolish gamble.”
“Trump believes he’s found a magic formula where he can have regime change without all the messiness,” he added.
Iran’s longtime Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in targeted strikes on Saturday, but plans for his replacement are already stoking fears of a prolonged war in the Middle East.
Khamenei’s successor “may be even further to the right” and “more dangerous than the current regime,” Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told MS NOW’s The Weekend. “It would be naive for anyone to think that this operation is over.”
On Saturday, Iran launched a series of retaliatory counterattacks on U.S. military bases in the region, resulting in the first deaths of American military personnel. The Pentagon announced Monday morning that a fourth U.S. service member has been killed in action, with several others injured as part of the operation, known as “Operation Epic Fury,” to target Iran’s military assets.
Overnight, Trump warned of consequences for Iran’s latest threats about new attacks on his Truth Social account: “THEY BETTER NOT DO THAT, HOWEVER, BECAUSE IF THEY DO, WE WILL HIT THEM WITH A FORCE THAT HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE!” Later, in a separate post, he revealed that the U.S. “largely destroyed” Iran’s naval headquarters and destroyed at least nine of its ships.
Oil prices are set to spike this week after ships stopped moving through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for a fifth of the world’s oil. Trump, who loves to talk about low gas prices, now must ensure oil can keep flowing from the region before consumers — who are already wary of inflation — also stoke political backlash to the conflict. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC+, decided to increase oil production in a virtual meeting on Sunday despite disruptions to shipments in the Gulf.
Speaking with The Atlantic, Trump downplayed expectations about the conflict’s effect on the oil market, saying that the impact would only be “huge” if “things went wrong.” Trading reopens on Sunday night. “We’ll see what happens,” Trump added.
Trump also faces newfound fissures within his base. Some of his staunchest conservative allies, including commentator Tucker Carlson and right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, have expressed deep frustration with the president’s decision to move forward with a large-scale military attack on Iran with Israel’s help. (Carlson on Saturday blasted the joint attacks as “absolutely disgusting and evil.”)
The president, for years, ran his campaigns for higher office on promises of putting an end to so-called never-ending wars. He even calls himself the “president of peace.”
In a national survey conducted by GrayHouse between Feb. 20 and 23, which was shared with MS NOW and recently presented to congressional Republicans, the majority of GOP voters surveyed, 86%, said they supported the U.S. using military force to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
“The narrative that the Republican Party is fractured on this is overstated,” according to Landon Wall, a Republican pollster. “When voters see a decisive military operation that doesn’t spiral into a larger conflict, they view it as a success.” Still, he acknowledged, “Voters are cautious of forever wars. Obviously, there is a lot that can still happen.”
However, a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Sunday, found that only 27% of Americans said they approved of the president’s operation in Iran.
Trump’s standing is further complicated by the fact that he did not seek congressional authorization or public approval before taking the U.S. into a direct conflict with Iran.
Rubin, the former Bush administration Pentagon official, said, “If we end up with a civil war in Iran, or if we end up with different factions gaining a hold of Iran’s radiological material or chemical weapons: It’s a whole different ball game.”
Compared to other military moves that have sparked similar backlash from MAGA loyalists in Trump’s first year, this conflict already poses the biggest threat to resulting in direct, long-term U.S. involvement. While the U.S. has financially supported Israel’s war in Gaza and Ukraine’s defense against Russia, American troops have never been directly involved — or killed in — either conflict.
Just one day after the Iran conflict began, that calculus has already changed in the Middle East.
Before the U.S. launched its strikes, Vice President JD Vance told The Washington Post on there was “no chance” the U.S. would be in a years-long conflict, describing himself as a “skeptic of foreign military interventions.” Nonetheless, in a video address to the nation without the White House press corps present, Trump laid out expansive goals in America’s undertaking of a “massive and ongoing” operation in Iran, including preventing Iran from destabilizing the region through its network of proxy terrorist groups, building up its missile arsenal, or obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Khamenei was the architect of militant groups informally known as the “Axis of Resistance” — including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza, as well as smaller groups in Iraq — that are aligned against the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia to protect Iran’s influence in the region. In an interview with MS NOW’s Mychael Schnell and Laura Barrón-López, Trump celebrated his death as “a great thing for our country.” He also referred to Khamenei, who also sponsored the slogan “Death to America,” as a “bad man.”
Iranians are celebrating the strikes as their hopes rise that it could precipitate the toppling of the oppressive regime over its people. Thousands reportedly died in mass protests that began late last year against the government and the country’s suffering economy. The president, in his call with MS NOW, repeatedly referred to celebrations by Iranian Americans occurring in Los Angeles, California, and elsewhere around the world.
The president ended his address to Americans with a message to the Iranian people. “The hour of your freedom is at hand,” he said. “Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
Akayla Gardner is a White House correspondent for MS NOW.