President Donald Trump has a new shiny object he’s hoping will distract the media from his catastrophic second term: A new war in the Middle East.
In the 1997 film “Wag the Dog,” Robert De Niro plays Conrad Brean — a professional distraction artist — who is hired by the president of the United States to divert the media’s attention away from a sex scandal with an underage girl just weeks before the election. Brean ends up teaming up with a Hollywood producer played by Dustin Hoffman to fabricate a war in Albania, which successfully pushes the sex scandal to the back pages of the newspaper before it disappears entirely from the news cycle, resulting in the president’s reelection.
Trump is very familiar with the art of distraction, and even as a private citizen he knew the power a war has over the media’s fickle attention span. On October 9, 2012, Trump tweeted: “Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin — watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.”
While it’s true that Iran obtaining nuclear weapons would present a danger to Israel, and while Israel is a sovereign country with its own military free to do what it feels necessary to protect itself, it’s also true that what happens between Iran and Israel should be of no concern to Americans, beyond macroeconomic reverberations (like the pending increase in oil prices due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz). Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio made that clear in a statement he issued following Israel’s first strikes in Iran in mid-June, telling the world that Israel “took unilateral action against Iran,” that the United States was “not involved with strikes against Iran,” and that the US’ only position was that it aimed to protect “American forces in the region.”
However, after the United States conducted a series of strikes with its B-2 bombers on Iranian nuclear sites, the US is officially involved in Israel’s conflict with Iran. The coming weeks will be critical to see if the media is still capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, as editors and journalists will have to choose between allowing its gaze to be diverted by the latest shiny object or continuing to cover the ongoing collapse of both Trump’s popular support, the first major domestic policy push of his second term, a debilitating trade war wreaking havoc on American businesses and consumers, and the increasing size and frequency of nationwide protests against his administration.
Presidents have relied on war in the past to distract from failures
To be clear, Trump would be far from the first US president to use war as a means of keeping the American public distracted from unflattering developments at home. In the fall of 2006, the Republican Party suffered a shellacking in the midterm elections and lost control of both chambers of Congress, with Democrats gaining a net total of 31 House seats, five Senate seats, and six governorships. It marked the first time since the Republican Party’s founding in 1854 that not a single Republican flipped a House, Senate, or gubernatorial seat previously held by a Democrat. On January 10, 2007 – just a week after the new Democratic-controlled Congress was sworn in – President George W. Bush announced a major troop surge in Iraq.
Democratic presidents have also carried out questionably timed military operations when they themselves were going through periods of unpopularity. In December of 1998, President Bill Clinton carried out a series of strikes on Iraq that the administration said were intended to “degrade” Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s ability to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. Then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Mississippi) called the timing of the operation “suspect” and “cursory,” given that Republicans were in the midst of impeachment proceedings against Clinton in response to the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. Just two days after the strikes, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives impeached Clinton (he was later acquitted by the Senate).
Given recent history, Trump suddenly using US military resources to attack Iran despite campaigning on pulling the US out of foreign conflicts naturally provokes questions about why he’s suddenly flip-flopping on his “America First” approach to foreign policy. The Associated Press recounted Trump calling former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley (who served in his first administration) a “warmonger” during his 2024 campaign. During a campaign rally in New Hampshire, Trump described his rival’s ideology as “let’s kill people all over the place and let’s make a lot of money for those people that make the messes.” He also frequently boasted that he was the only US president “in generations” who didn’t start a war.
Trump also railed against foreign wars during his first bid for the presidency. During a 2016 Republican presidential debate, Trump called the Iraq War a “big fat mistake.” And in a CNN interview, he also called the US’ invasion of Afghanistan a “terrible mistake” that cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.
However, just five months into his second term, Trump has reversed all of those prior positions by getting the US involved in a war with one of the two leading superpowers of the Middle East (the other being Israel). Unlike Iraq, which is a country of 168,754 square miles that had a population of 26.8 million in 2003 prior to Bush’s invasion, Iran spans 636,372 square miles and has a population of 90.61 million. According to the United Nations, Iran is the 17th most populous country in the world.
Even the most diehard members of Trump’s base are starting to turn on him over his bombing of Iran. Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) — who Trump initially tapped to be his second-term attorney general before Gaetz withdrew his nomination roughly a week later — said during a recent episode of his show on the far-right One America News Network that the bombing was “not about Iran’s nuclear program.” He pointed out that North Korea’s nuclear program was a “far greater threat to the United States than Iran’s,” and that he had firsthand knowledge of North Korea’s capabilities as a former member of the House Armed Services Committee for eight years.
“Iran has neither the bomb, the delivery system, nor the re-entry vehicle that you would need for any intercontinental ballistic missile to launch and reenter orbit,” Gaetz said. “North Korea has all three! North Korea could launch a nuclear weapon at [the] mainland United States today. We’ve probably got the ability to knock it out of the sky, but Iran can’t even get their bird in the air.”
Steve Bannon, who was Trump’s first-term White House chief strategist, lamented that Trump may have ended up embroiling the United States in another “forever war” if Iran retaliates and the US strikes back in response to the Iranian regime. Far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) has accused the “uniparty” of attempting to “politically destroy” her for “opposing regime change in Iran.” And Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), who voted in line with Trump’s positions 71% of the time in his first term, told CNN’s Manu Raju that Trump’s offensive against Iran could mean Republicans “lose the majority” after the 2026 midterms.
“I think this was a bad move politically, but it’s also just a bad move legally and Constitutionally and policy wise,” Massie said, adding that Trump “absolutely” broke his campaign promise to not involve the US in any new foreign wars.
As a nation whose military is already stretched thin attempting to keep Russia from conquering Ukraine, and trying to keep China from taking over Taiwan, the US can hardly afford another long-term commitment in the Middle East. So what’s the real reason for Trump’s sudden about-face?
Trump is hoping a new war in the Middle East will bail him out
Just before the June strikes on Iran, Trump experienced a slew of negative poll results showing that most Americans have soured on his second term. And it isn’t just Democrats and independents with a negative opinion of the current administration — a growing number of Republicans are also less enthusiastic in their support of Trump since his second term began in January:
- Trump had a job approval rating of just 38% according to a Quinnipiac University poll in mid-June. The renowned polling institution specifically found that HR 1 (his “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”) has an underwater approval rating, with 53% of respondents saying they opposed the legislation while just 27% support it (20% had no opinion). Only 67% of respondents who identified as Republican said they backed the legislation.
- An NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll from June found that 55% of Americans aged 18 and up disapprove of Trump’s performance five months into his second term. While that number remains unchanged from an April survey, pollsters found that Republicans in June were 5% less likely to say that they “strongly support” the administration. And while 46% of respondents who identified with Trump’s MAGA movement told NBC in April that they were “thrilled” with Trump’s policies, that number dropped to 37% in June.
- Even on the specific issues that helped him get reelected, like immigration and the economy, Trump’s popular support is slipping. The Economist’s polling data shows Trump underwater on kitchen-table issues like taxes and spending, inflation and prices, and jobs and the economy. Pew Research found in early June that while Americans were evenly split on Trump’s handling of immigration, a majority of respondents disapproved of specific actions, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on workplaces (54% disapproval), ending Temporary Protected Status for immigrants who came to the US fleeing war and persecution in their home countries (59% disapproval), and suspension of most asylum applications (60% disapproval).
In addition to these polls, Trump has also experienced significant public protests against his administration. The June “No Kings” protests — which coincided with both Trump’s 79th birthday and his military parade honoring the 250th anniversary of the Army — brought out roughly five million people in more than 2,100 cities in the US and around the world. Data journalist G. Elliott Morris argued that the “No Kings” event was the single-largest day of protest in US history, eclipsing even the Women’s March of 2017.
And as the Quinnipiac poll touched on, Trump’s first major domestic policy bill is on life support in the Republican-controlled US Senate, after only barely passing through the majority-Republican House of Representatives by a one-vote margin. Given their 53-47 Senate majority, Republicans can only afford three defections if they hope to pass a bill back to the House with a tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance. And because moderate Republicans like Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have already publicly indicated a hesitancy to support the bill, Trump can only afford to have one more Republican vote no, assuming all Democrats remain opposed.
This could prove exceedingly difficult, as even reliably conservative senators like Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) and Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) have all gone on the record sharply criticizing the bill. Hawley — whose constituency includes a large share of residents who rely on Medicaid for health insurance – has said he wouldn’t vote for a bill that significantly cuts the program. Johnson has argued the bill doesn’t go far enough to slash federal spending, and Paul has said he wouldn’t vote for a bill that raises the US’ debt limit – even though not doing so could put the US in default and jeopardize the global economy by mid-July, according to Reuters.
Even Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama), who has been one of Trump’s most stalwart supporters in the Senate, has openly expressed his concern about one provision in the bill that forces states to share the burden of funding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) for the first time in US history. The former Auburn University football coach — who is now seeking the Republican nomination in Alabama’s 2026 gubernatorial election — hasn’t said this is a line in the sand for him, though his statement suggests that the food stamps section of HR 1 may need to be revised in order to ensure his support.
Trump’s ongoing trade war with China has also continued to plague his public perception, with CNBC reporting in May that Americans are still likely to see higher prices and lighter shelves at stores despite a reprieve in the imposition of new import duties. Retailers say that the increase in tariffs has made it economically unfeasible to complete full orders. And because the typical turnaround in the China-US supply chain is three months between the ordering process and goods being shipped and stocked, this means that parents shopping for back-to-school season in August could be faced with supply shortages and higher-than-expected prices.
Following a multi-day trade summit in London, the Trump administration announced an agreed-upon framework for a trade deal with China that still keeps tariffs at higher rates than before the trade war started. The World Economic Forum reported that tariffs on Chinese imports would be at 55%. This includes the 10% universal tariff on all trade partners announced in April, along with a 20% tariff on Chinese goods and preexisting 25% tariffs that Trump put in place during his first term. Roughly 60% of Walmart’s inventory comes from China, meaning families that do their shopping at the retail giant can be expected to pay significantly higher prices for many products.
With so many issues at home dragging down his public approval rating, Trump may welcome a new war in the Middle East if only to give him a respite from the beating his administration and policy agenda have been taking in the media. Global geopolitical events are always important and should be covered, but it’s incumbent upon journalists to not take the bait and let up in their reporting on the Trump administration should the US end up getting involved in another major war. Trump’s actions in Iran should be viewed as another desperate attempt by a significantly beleaguered administration to wag the dog and divert our eyes.
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