Let us read it for you. Listen now.
Your browser does not support the audio element.
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 77-23. Phil Donahue was fired by MSNBC for giving voice to the anti-war movement. Artists were canceled for expressing their opposition.
When, on the eve of the invasion in March 2003, Natalie Maines, 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 the United States, the band fell out of the Billboard Top 40.
The same month, when documentarian Michael Moore gave an anti-war 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. Last weekend, during a tirade on his Truth Social website, the president attacked The Wall Street Journal for reporting on an Iranian military strike against U.S. planes in Saudi Arabia, and called on other news outlets to be charged with “TREASON.” Brendan Carr, Trump’s thuggish Federal Communications Commission chair, threatened to revoke broadcasters’ licenses over their war coverage.
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” 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.
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 Sen. Chris Murphy on CNN recently, 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 fundraising 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 playing golf. Trump refuses to treat his role with reverence, so others don’t feel much need to, either.
Taboos against deriding a wartime American leader have disintegrated, and this administration can’t re-assemble them by force. You don’t have to be brave or rebellious anymore to be anti-war in America. Trump has helped make it a mainstream position.
—––––––––––—
Michelle Goldberg is a New York Times columnist.
