Whining Wingnuts Can't Figure Out How To Spin Trump's War Anymore
As President Donald Trump’s war on Iran extends into its sixth month, some figures on the right are recalibrating their messaging from an original demand for maximalist victory to something much more modest.
Although the war has created some fractures in right-wing media, at the outset of the conflict it had no shortage of boosters — either Iran hawks or MAGA hacks. Now, as the Iranian government has survived months of bombing and operationalized its previously unrealized control of the Strait of Hormuz, some of those pundits are scaling back their ambitions.
MAGA influencer and right-wing media weathervane Benny Johnson provides the clearest example of this trend. On March 12, Johnson, who initially was both skeptical of the war and giddy with the promise of U.S. world domination, offered a particularly Trump-ian rebranding proposal.
“Can we rename the Straits of Hormuz the Straits of America, please?” Johnson said. “Are we there yet? We should be there.”
Fast forward to July 26, with the public turning against the war and any endgame seemingly a distant prospect, and Johnson sounded quite different.
“If Iran oversees boats in the Strait of Hormuz, that doesn’t bother me one bit,” Johnson said. “I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. I didn’t care about it ahead of time, and that’s where we were before the war, and I don’t care about it now really. I want — oil was less than $2 a gallon in January of 2026, so that’s kind of where my head’s at.”
Johnson’s about-face may be the most dramatic rhetorical retreat, but he’s not alone. Newsmax host Carl Higbie, who endorsed bombing Iran “back to the stone age” in late February, spent months praising the Trump administration’s plan for the war only to recently change his tune.
“Now, the bulk of the people in that press briefing room are so high on their own farts that they stick their nose in the air and [say] well, if I don’t know the plan, that means Trump doesn’t have a plan,” Higbie said on April 6.
“You know what?” Higbie added. “The Pentagon and Trump and the State [Department] — they owe us no explanation on what they plan to do.”
A chyron on his April 23 show read: “Legacy media falsely claims Trump has no plan w/ Iran.”
This is the highest — not to sound crass again — return on investment in military history,” Higbie said on June 17, while discussing the deaths of 13 U.S. service members.
But in the last few days, Higbie has started to express some doubts about the Trump administration’s larger strategy even as he continued to push for dangerous escalations.
“This is now a war — this is a turn of events in timeline,” Higbie said on July 23 in response to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth asking Congress for additional military funds after four more U.S. service members were killed.
“You said you need this much more money,” Higbie continued. “So tell us what it buys us.”
“I will pay my taxes twice this year to help with that nut if you tell Congress that this is what we want to do and this is how we’re going to achieve it,” he added. “Like the first mission in Iran, Midnight Hammer — there was [an] objective, it was planned, there was action, and completion. And then you go get Congress to buy in and they declare war. … For God’s sakes, give those families on the tarmac today a reason their children died.”
The chyron read: “Define the mission.”
Like Johnson, The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles has alternately expressed hesitancy about the war while also defending the Trump administration from accusations of “hypocrisy.” Still, on March 10 he was willing to dismiss the concerns of right-wing critics of the campaign to that point.
“As I’ve said from the beginning of the Iran war — very, very high stakes for President Trump,” Knowles said. “But as of now, all the ‘panicans’ predictions have been wrong. Like, all of them.”
But more recently, Knowles acknowledged the war’s deep and growing unpopularity in a monologue about the House of Representatives passing a war powers resolution in opposition to the conflict.
“It’s a leading indicator that the appetite for this war is waning, not just with the broader public but even among the legislators,” he said on July 24. “So I agree in principle it would be good to wrap-up the war, but this is the problem with war. … These situations can really spiral out of control.”
“It should be wrapped up, but there’s no end in sight,” Knowles concluded. “Because in war, your opponent gets a say.”
This shifting rhetoric shows the delicate balancing act right-wing media are engaged in: The hawks want to escalate and the hacks want to continue to ingratiate themselves with the administration, while even Trump voters are growing more opposed to another forever war.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
Graph by Molly Butler for Media Matters
