Donald Trump must envy George W. Bush for the cultural compliance he got while dragging America to war in Iraq.
If you didn’t live through it, it’s hard to convey the atmosphere of stifling conformity that choked the country in the run-up to that disaster. Much of the Democratic Party fell in line; authorization for military force against Iraq passed the Senate 77 to 23. Phil Donahue was fired by MSNBC for giving voice to the antiwar movement. Artists were canceled for expressing their opposition.
When, on the eve of the invasion in March 2003, Natalie Maines, the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, denounced Bush from a London stage, the fallout nearly buried the band. Radio stations boycotted their music and two Colorado DJs who played their songs were suspended. Once one of the most popular country acts in America, the band fell out of the Billboard Top 40.
The same month, when the documentarian Michael Moore gave an antiwar speech at the Oscars, he was met by loud boos in addition to applause. “One pundit after another was saying, ‘Well, that’s the end of Michael Moore,’” he told The New York Times.
Trump has received no such deference for his adventurism in Iran, so he’s trying to force it. On Sunday night, during a tirade on his Truth Social website, the president attacked The Wall Street Journal for reporting on an Iranian military strike against American planes in Saudi Arabia, and called on other news outlets to be charged with “TREASON.” Brendan Carr, Trump’s thuggish Federal Communications Commission chairman, threatened to revoke broadcasters’ licenses over their war coverage. Criticizing CNN’s reporting on the war last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made clear that he’s hoping its new owners quash its independence: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
Rarely in modern history has an American administration made such blatantly authoritarian efforts to subdue its critics. Such naked coercion is a screaming sign of democratic breakdown. But we shouldn’t lose sight of how Trump is failing to bend the country to his will. Even as he’s wrecking American institutions, Trump is revealing the limits of his cultural influence.
American wars usually commence with public enthusiasm even if they end in shame. The whole concept of “wagging the dog” — from the 1997 satire starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro — assumes that a president can get his ratings up and deflect attention from a scandal by bombing another country. But it’s not working for Trump. The Iran war has been unpopular from the jump, garnering less support in polls than any other American conflict for which we have public opinion data. Trump’s approval remains about as low as it was when the war began.
Republicans, being largely in lock step with Trump, continue to broadly support the war. But conservative influencers, a crucial part of the right’s propaganda ecosystem, are bitterly divided. Joe Rogan, who backed Trump in the 2024 election and even attended the inauguration, said Trump supporters feel “betrayed.” On X, the right-wing streamer Megyn Kelly accused a pro-war pundit, Mark Levin, of having a “micropenis,” leading Trump to defend Levin.
Tucker Carlson, one of the most listened-to Republican podcasters, has called the war “absolutely disgusting and evil.” And this past weekend, in a bizarre turn, he claimed that the Justice Department is planning to charge him with acting as an unregistered foreign agent because of his contacts with Iran. It’s hard to know what to make of Carlson’s wild claim, but if nothing else, it illustrates the scale of his breach with the White House.
Typically, the go-to move for Republicans at war is to bludgeon their Democratic opponents as unpatriotic. That’s harder to do without an echo chamber backing them up, especially since leaks suggest that even the vice president thought the war was a bad idea. Interviewing Senator Chris Murphy on CNN last week, Jake Tapper asked whether his opposition to funding Trump’s war might be taken as voting against the troops. That’s the sort of argument that used to terrify Democrats, but Murphy was utterly unfazed. “Oh, come on,” he said. “The American people don’t want this war.”
One reason the old hawkish canards no longer work is that Trump has so degraded the aura that used to surround America’s commander in chief. A recent fund-raising email for Trump’s political action committee used a photograph of the president — wearing a white baseball hat — receiving the remains of American service members. With his war raging, he’s spent the last two weekends golfing. Trump refuses to treat his role with reverence, so others don’t feel much need to either.
There was far more criticism of Trump at the Oscars on Sunday than there was of Bush in 2003. The host, Conan O’Brien, and Jimmy Kimmel both mocked him. Accepting the award for best documentary, David Borenstein, director of “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” alluded to both America and Russia when he described the “moral choice” citizens face when “a government murders people on the streets of our major cities” and “oligarchs take over the media.” Presenting the prize for best foreign film, Javier Bardem said: “No to war. And free Palestine.” “One Battle After Another” — a thriller about resistance to a Christian nationalist, anti-immigrant brand of American fascism — won best picture.
This time, stars speaking out against Trump faced no significant backlash. Taboos against deriding a wartime American leader have disintegrated, and this administration can’t reassemble them by force. You don’t have to be brave or rebellious anymore to be antiwar in America. Trump has helped make it a mainstream position.
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