As Donald Trump moved the nation closer to a military conflict with Iran, there was some quantifiable evidence that suggested the American mainstream was not prepared for war. A University of Maryland poll released two weeks ago, for example, found that only about 1 in 5 Americans (21%) expressed support for the United States initiating an attack on Iran.
A week later, an Associated Press poll found that only about 1 in 4 Americans (27%) said they trusted the incumbent president to make the right choice on using military force abroad.
Those national surveys, however, were conducted before the U.S. military offensive began. Would public attitudes change after the bombs started falling? Evidently not. Reuters reported on its first poll, conducted with Ipsos, on the crisis.
Only one in four Americans approves of the U.S. strikes that killed Iran’s leader, while about half — including one in four Republicans — believe President Donald Trump is too willing to use military force, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that concluded on Sunday.
Some 27% of respondents said they approved of the strikes, while 43% disapproved and 29% were not sure.
The same data found that a 56% majority of Americans think Trump is too willing to use military force to advance U.S. interests, which seems reasonable given the number of countries he’s attacked over the last year.
On Saturday night, less than a day into the conflict, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, whose appearances on Fox News have reached Pam Bondi-like levels of frequency, told Sean Hannity that “celebrations” for the Trump-ordered attack “should be bipartisan.”
As it happens, we are seeing some bipartisanship in public reactions to the attack, but it’s in opposition to the offensive, not in support.
Time will tell, of course, how and whether Americans’ attitudes change as the conflict moves forward, though the more U.S. service members are killed in combat, and as the public confronts adverse economic consequences, there’s no reason to assume the polling won’t get worse.
For the White House, the survey data has to be discouraging, but if the president wants to know why exactly the American mainstream is not on board with the operation, he has no one to blame but himself.
Ahead of the U.S. offensive in Iraq in 2003, George W. Bush at least made the effort to prepare the nation for war. The president’s policy proved disastrous, but before launching the offensive he told the public what he was doing, why he was doing it, why he saw the mission as necessary and what he hoped to accomplish. While the failed policy ultimately proved wildly unpopular, when “shock and awe” got underway in Baghdad, polls showed strong public support.
Trump didn’t bother with any comparable efforts. Indeed, the Republican incumbent apparently didn’t see the point in informing the public about, or even trying to convince it of, the merits of his policy — to the extent that he has a policy beyond “drop bombs and hope it all works out.”
The president, in other words, didn’t make the case for war. The resulting polling data was inevitable.
