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Polls Show Americans Oppose Trump's War On Iran

Within hours of President Donald Trump announcing his decision this weekend to bomb multiple military sites in Iran, public opinion polling showed a plurality of Americans opposing the action.

Trump reportedly chose to launch the attack after hours of watching Fox News’ positive coverage of Israel’s attacks on Iran, prompting Iran to respond on Monday with missile attacks on American bases in Qatar and Iraq.

In a YouGov poll taken on Saturday and Sunday, 46 percent of respondents said they strongly or somewhat disapproved of the bombing campaign that Trump instigated. The biggest bloc of people opposed were Democrats, with 70 percent disapproving of the Republican’s actions. Among independents, 51 percent opposed the bombing and even among Republicans, 13 percent said they didn’t back Trump.

A plurality of those who were polled (44 percent) also said they believed Trump’s attack would make Americans less safe. Only 25 percent bought into Trump’s argument that the bombings would secure the country, with 20 percent responding that they were not sure and 11 percent saying that it would neitjher improve nor degrade safety.

The new polling echoed public opinion before the bombing kicked off. In a June 18 Washington Post poll, airstrikes were opposed by 45 percent of the people answering the poll, with 25 percent supporting action.

One woman who was polled, a 74-year-old Republican from Washington who voted for Trump, explained to the outlet, “I think Pres. Trump and the U.S. needs to continue negotiations and alternatives before the U.S. bombs Iran and starts a World War III.”

Trump is following the drumbeat being played on Fox News, but even members of his own party are expressing some level of dissent.

On Monday, Trump complained in a Truth Social post that Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky is a “simple minded grandstander” for voicing opposition to the bombing. “MAGA should drop this pathetic LOSER, Tom Massie, like the plague!” Trump fumed.

Trump also made it clear in another social media post that he is unprepared for the economic fallout from his bombing run.

“EVERYONE, KEEP OIL PRICES DOWN. I’M WATCHING! YOU’RE PLAYING RIGHT INTO THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY. DON’T DO IT!” he wrote.

Oil supplies could be tightened as world markets and governments assess the fallout from Trump’s escalation and that could lead to higher gas prices. Trump spent much of the last four years complaining about gas prices under former President Joe Biden and claimed he would lower them on his first day in office.

Like his promises of “peace,” that didn’t happen.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Trump Policies Poised To Devastate His Voters In Rural America

Everyone is talking, understandably, about Iran. But the rest of Donald Trump’s policy agenda continues to goose-step on. Radical changes in social spending, immigration policy, and tariffs — changes that will hurt tens of millions of Americans — are either about to start or are already happening.

And one point I haven’t seen emphasized much is that while the human damage from these policies will be very widespread, it will be especially severe in rural areas and small towns — the very areas that overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2024.

The first thing you need to understand is that while rural Americans like to think of themselves as self-reliant, the fact is that poorer, more rural states are in effect heavily subsidized by richer states like Massachusetts and New Jersey.

This reality makes it inevitable that the standard conservative fiscal agenda — tax cuts for the rich, benefit cuts for the poor and middle class — hurts the heartland more than it hurts major metropolitan areas. But MAGA’s Reverse Robin Hoodism goes far beyond the standard conservative agenda, in ways that will be especially devastating to rural areas and small towns.

First, consider the shape of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. (I think it’s important to call it by its ludicrous official name, as a reminder of the extent to which Republican members of Congress have become North Korea-style sycophants.) The final details haven’t been settled, and there’s still an outside chance that the whole thing falls apart. But it’s almost certain that there will be savage cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, programs that disproportionately help Trump-supporting rural areas.

Let’s talk about Medicaid first, a program that is far more important than most affluent Americans tend to realize. Almost 40 percent of children are covered by Medicaid, with some of the highest percentages in deep red states like Alabama and Mississippi. Medicaid pays for 42 percent of births in America. And more to my point, Medicaid covers a higher fraction of the population in rural than in urban counties. So deep cuts in the program will hit Trump-supporting regions especially hard.

The same is true for OBBB’s deep cuts to food stamps.

The damage will be magnified by Republican plans to cut Medicaid spending by adding work requirements. We know from repeated experience that such requirements don’t actually lead to significant increases in employment. What they do instead is block access to health care by creating bureaucratic hurdles for beneficiaries — hurdles that rural Americans, often burdened by limited formal education and inadequate internet access, find especially hard to overcome.

Furthermore, rural America has long had a problem of hospital closures: It’s hard for hospitals to stay in business given both low population density and limited ability of patients to pay. The Beautiful Bill will accelerate this trend, so that even rural residents who can afford care may very well find it geographically out of reach.

In addition, federal health spending, both Medicaid and Medicare, is disproportionately important in supporting rural and left-behind local economies. For example, the economy of West Virginia no longer rests on coal mining, which employs very few people these days. It would be more accurate to say that the foundation of West Virginia’s economy is federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid. That is, in deep red West Virginia, Medicare and Medicaid are directly and indirectly a major source of income.

Then there are Trump’s immigration policies. American agriculture relies heavily on hired workers — and around two thirds of these hired workers are immigrants. A majority of these foreign-born workers are undocumented:

Moreover, even if you a legal resident or even a native-born citizen, do you really feel safe if ICE thinks you look like an illegal immigrant? Not surprisingly, there are reports of widespread ICE raids on farms and of workers refusing to work out of fear of arrest and deportation.

Can immigrant workers be replaced with native-born workers, or even with legal immigrants? No. All indications are that few native-born Americans would be willing to do these jobs unless they were paid much higher wages. Under the Biden administration the U.S. introduced a program offering grants to farmers who bring in foreign workers legally — but the Trump administration has frozen funding for that program, including money that had already been promised, leaving farmers on the hook for many thousands of dollars.

So Trump’s anti-immigrant policies are inflicting will be a major blow to U.S. agriculture — to family farms that employ immigrant workers and are being left high and dry, to food processing and local retail. Like Medicaid, immigrant farm labor directly and indirectly supports many rural jobs for the native-born.

Finally, there’s the trade war. In case you haven’t noticed, Trump hasn’t yet delivered a single one of the 90 trade deals he promised to negotiate by July 8. China has already retaliated, and others will follow. And U.S. agriculture is highly dependent on exports:

Nor can you argue that farmers will make up for lost exports by producing goods we currently import, since we mainly import the farm products we can’t produce here. That’s a point that seems to be lost on Trump’s Commerce Secretary. Recently Howard Lutnick clashed with Rep. Madeline Dean over the impact of tariffs on prices of food items including bananas. “If you build in America … there will be no tariff,” Lutnick argued. “We cannot build bananas in America,” she replied, somehow managing to avoid saying “Duh.”

While many are now realizing that Trump’s policies will produce social and economic disaster, relatively few understand that the disaster will fall disproportionately on rural Trump voters. But of course it will. For the purveyor of Trump bibles and Trump meme coins, screwing the little guy has always been his personal style of grift. It remains to be seen if rural Trump supporters will awaken from their naivete.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times. Please consider subscribing to his daily Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

'We've Been Lied To': Margie Says Iran Strike Exposed Ruinous Rift In GOP

One of President Donald Trump's loudest supporters in Congress has become increasingly vocal in her opposition to his latest decision to conduct strikes on Iran.

CNN reported Monday that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is now directly warning her party that the "very big divide" could end up costing Republicans their majorities in Congress next year if the GOP becomes bogged down in another foreign war while Americans' material needs go unmet. The Georgia Republican sought to stake out common ground between herself and the president, telling CNN that both she and Trump were elected on a promise of "no more foreign wars, no more regime change."

"We’ve been lied to too many times, and I think it’s right to be skeptical," Greene said in response to a question about whether Trump's policies risked losing the support of the MAGA faithful.

"If this war were to continue, and we were to see, sadly, see American troops coming home with on flag-draped coffins, I think you would see Americans totally saying the same thing I’m saying, I hope that never happens again," Greene said, emphasizing that she still believes "President Trump has us on a path to peace."

According to Greene — who has consistently opposed sending resources to Ukraine in its war with Russia — American voters are expecting their leaders to put their concerns front and center, arguing that voters are "very much focused on their American life and their American problems." And she said that new escalations in the Middle East could prove to be a tipping point for many voters next fall.

"Republicans need to earn Americans’ votes," she said. "I don’t think we’re earning our votes in the midterm, and that’s on Congress."

Greene unleashed on the Trump administration on social media earlier on Monday, saying that as a 51 year-old American, she had "watched our country go to war in foreign lands for foreign causes on behalf of foreign interests for as long as I can remember." And she added that while she supports Israel's right to defend itself, she opposed U.S. military involvement in Israeli matters.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

With Trump, It's A New War -- And Always Another Lie

If there is one thing we have learned about Donald Trump over the last 10 years – for New Yorkers, over the last 50 – it is that you cannot believe anything he says.

Anything.

If he said he was going to give Iran a chance to come back to the negotiating table and he would mull things over for two weeks, the Iran attack was going to happen in two days. If he called Saturday’s bombing Iran “a spectacular military success,” it was something less than that. If he said Iran’s nuclear sites were “obliterated,” they weren’t. If he said Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon has been ended, it hasn’t.

Trump toyed around with whether or not he was going to order the attack, telling reporters on the White House lawn on Wednesday, “I may do it. I may not do it. Nobody knows what I’m going to do.”

That was a lie, but it wasn’t a lie lie. It was a strategic feint. Any leader who is planning an attack on an enemy is going to try to seem like it’s either not going to happen, or the planning is in an early stage, when actually it is almost complete. That was the case with Iran.

Planning for the attack had been going on for weeks, and Tehran knew it. They probably started moving the centrifuges necessary to enrich uranium, and the uranium they had already enriched, away from their three nuclear weapons development sites when Trump was elected last November. By the time he started bellowing that he would “never” allow Iran to build a nuclear weapon, their nuclear material was safe somewhere else.

Trump tells so many lies every day, we only half listen to him. We have gotten used to tucking his lies away in mental rabbit holes so we can get ready for his next bunch of whoppers. But you want to know who has been recording every syllable that comes out of his mouth? The Iranians. They have spent years slowly accumulating enough partially enriched uranium that they have been within a year, or even within months according to some intelligence estimates, of being able to produce a bomb. Do you think they were going to let all that work go to waste just because the Americans were stupid enough to put the international clown, Donald Trump, back in the White House? Not a chance in hell. They were ready. They’ve been ready for months.

With Donald Trump, nothing is ever as it seems. Why does he tell so many lies? Is it because he can’t help himself, that it’s pathological? Not even close. He tells lies to keep his opponents guessing, out of step, off their game.

Even the war he just started with Iran is a lie, in that it has another purpose. I read somewhere over the last few days that all wars are started as much for domestic reasons as for their stated foreign policy goals. Why did George Bush start his war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq? Did he really believe that Iran had its own secret nuclear weapons program, or that they had developed a stockpile of WMD, weapons of mass destruction? No. He needed a war, and Afghanistan was not enough, so he ginned one up against Saddam.

Domestically, Trump is not in trouble, but he’s not in great shape. He can’t get interest rates down. He hasn’t whipped inflation. His Big Beautiful Bill is in trouble. His attempt to use Elon Musk and his DOGE-niks to conquer the budget deficit and save trillions in spending was an abject failure, with recent stories saying the whole thing is going to end up costing more than it saved. And his big plan to get tariffs to solve everything has failed miserably.

All the stories about tariffs now lead with how Chinese President Xi Jinping has played him like a violin. He can’t even get his big ICE roundup of undocumented immigrants up to speed. There were reports early this month about Trump’s immigration hatchet man, Stephen Miller, “yelling” at Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, ordering them to triple their arrests.

Trump’s war against Iran isn’t just about preventing them from developing a nuclear weapon. Like everything else, the war is about Donald Trump. He was going to drop that gigantic Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb from the moment he learned it existed. He needed that bombing campaign the way he needs golf courses and Diet Cokes and well-done steaks. He needed the White House appearance last night backed up by his war puppies, Vance, Hegseth, and Rubio. He needed his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon this morning giving out the numbers – 125 aircraft, 24 Tomahawks, seven B-2 bombers, 14 bunker busters – complete with map headlined with the mission moniker – this is so perfect, it’s all Trump – “Operation Midnight Hammer.”

You know what he’s doing, because he’s done it so many times before: Hey, look over here! Not only a big shiny object, a big shiny BOMB…which he puts in ALL CAPS every time he uses the word.

Because why? Because Donald Trump. The whole thing was Donald Trump all the time, all the way, from beginning to end. And it’s going to stay Donald Trump. You want to know why? Because now will come the analysis that the attack wasn’t as successful as he said, and he’ll be able to attack anyone who questions his genius. He’s already started, going after the lone Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who strayed off the reservation by claiming that the attack was unconstitutional. Trump started up a new SuperPAC to back anybody who wants to run against the poor guy. And woe be unto anyone who questions Trump’s assertion that Iran’s nuclear ambitions are done for. He’ll be able to throw around the T-word, “traitor,” if you dare point out inconvenient facts like reports that there was no measurable radiation produced from the bombing of the three nuclear sites. Not even a roentgen, according to the IAEA, was emitted from the destruction done to the Iranian nuclear facilities.

But Trump’s war puppy at the Pentagon was jubilant: "Iran's nuclear ambitions have been obliterated," Hegseth crowed at an 8 a.m. press conference at the Pentagon this morning. "The operation President Trump planned was bold and it was brilliant."

There could be good reasons for the peculiar lack of radiation from the damage done to three nuclear weapons sites. Maybe at Fordo, where satellite photos show six craters that look like someone stabbed the earth with an ice pick, the bombs went off so deep and caused such a collapse underground that they sealed off all the radiation. Maybe the same thing happened at Natanz, where another neat hole has appeared in the middle of an open field surrounded by a curving two-lane road.

We won’t know until the Pentagon does its BDA, battle damage assessment, and maybe not even after that, because which Iranian official is going to allow anyone onto any of the top-secret sites to check out the holes and maybe put a Geiger-counter on the gray dust?

Which is exactly the way Trump likes it. Who is going to question his chest-pounding assertions about his “brilliant” attack that has “obliterated” Iran’s dream of nuclear weapons?

Well, the Russkis, for one. Former Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, got on his Telegram account this morning and announced that other countries are "ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads." He didn’t go into any details, but presumably that would mean Russia and its new war-buddy North Korea.

And then there is this possibility that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere, so I’ll just put it out there right now: What if Iran has already succeeded in producing a nuclear weapon? They haven’t let the IAEA near their nuclear facilities for a while, so what if Iran cranked up its 60 percent uranium to “weapons grade” 90 percent, and they went ahead and made one? And having made it, then squirrelled it away far from where they knew the U.S. would come a-bombing-when-they-come.

While we’re at it, let’s throw in this hideous tidbit. What if the Ayatollah, at age 86, is sufficiently infirm and hidden away that some Republican Guard maniac up and decides, hey, let’s lob our nuke at Jerusalem and see what happens?

Every military expert who can get himself or herself on the TeeVee has been yapping about how easy wars are to start, but goodness me, how hard they are to end. Well, I’m not on the TeeVee, but I’ll agree with the experts on that one.

But I haven’t heard many of them talking about what wars have this extra added little tendency to produce every time you start one:

Unforeseen consequences.

Get ready, because we are in for a few, and they come from a place where Donald Trump, no student of history he, has ever spent much time.

Donald Trump will be learning that it’s a brand new thing to lie yourself out of inconvenient facts like dead American bodies.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

Polls Show Americans Oppose Trump's War On Iran

Trump Policies Poised To Devastate His Voters In Rural America

'We've Been Lied To': Margie Says Iran Strike Exposed Ruinous Rift In GOP

With Trump, It's A New War -- And Always Another Lie

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