US President Donald Trump before departing the White House on February 13. Photo / Peter W. Stevenson, The Washington Post
A little more than a week on, United States President Donald Trump is recasting the role of wartime leader in his image.
After launching a joint campaign with Israel of war on Iran, he is breaking from generations of practice.
Trump is attacking domestic enemies, jumping on issues as far afield as alleged voter fraud and college sports, and revelling in meme-driven celebrations of America’s military prowess.
Trump’s approach to leading the US in war is in keeping with his precedent-smashing style of politics.
His supporters say that style has enabled him to connect with Americans and build a passionate bond with his political base in a way his opponents have not.
But his lack of a visible effort to try to expand the basis of support for the war carries risks.
That’s especially true as the US death toll mounts, petrol prices shoot upward and other issues Americans care about, such as the economy, take a back seat to what Trump says is an attempt to fix a problem that no American president since the Iranian Revolution in 1979 has dared to solve.
Trump has devoted much of his time over the past week to meetings with top national security advisers and managing the war.
He has also found space to post on Truth Social eight times about a dispute with comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher, whom he declared was a “highly overrated lightweight”, joke with Latin American leaders about whether to charge money for his endorsement in their races, and opine on the physical attraction of the star soccer player Lionel Messi and the entire Inter Miami championship team.
Hours after returning from Delaware, where he took part, while wearing a white baseball cap with the letters USA on the front, in a solemn observance at Dover Air Force Base of the return of the remains of the first six US soldiers killed in the war with Iran, Trump posted about the Save America Act, a Bill that would require a passport or birth certificate when registering to vote.
“It’s all people care about!!!” he wrote.
As of Tuesday, of the 222 posts on Truth Social he has made since the February 28 video announcing the start of the war, fewer than one in five was about Iran.
“When you’re leading the country into war, you want to bring Democrats and Republicans and war critics in if you can, or at least avoid antagonising them,” said Peter Feaver, who advised President George W. Bush on national security strategy and is now a professor at Duke University who has studied how presidents lead in wartime.
“I don’t yet see the effort by the Administration to forge a non-MAGA coalition of support for this, but that could come if the war becomes more arduous and costly,” Feaver said.
All US presidents juggle priorities during their terms in office, and risky military forays can compete for the bandwidth of any leader.
Just after authorising the 2011 raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama delivered a comedy routine at the White House correspondents’ dinner, a commitment he later said he kept because he didn’t want to do anything to tip off bin Laden that something was about to happen.
Bush was immersed in budget negotiations with Congress in March 2003 when he ordered the invasion of Iraq, although his public calendar for the week after the war started was almost entirely consumed by war-related events.
He also spent months building support for the war both at home, where he sought and received congressional authorisation, and abroad, forging alliances and appealing to foreign leaders by making his case to the United Nations Security Council.
Trump has taken a different approach.
He made his final decision to launch an attack while flying to Corpus Christi, Texas, to champion energy independence, then made an unannounced stop at a Whataburger on his way back to Air Force One, buying hamburgers for customers at the fast-food restaurant and for his plane.
“We got more votes than anybody in the history of Texas. That’s pretty good,” Trump told patrons there. “I’m going to get some stuff for Air Force One, and I’m going to get the hell out of here, all right?”
Then he flew to his resort in Palm Beach, Florida, not the White House, to monitor the attack as it unfolded.
He announced the momentous start of the war clad in a white USA baseball cap. Hours later, he announced the death of the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with a written Truth Social post.
The White House has embraced muscular, meme-driven imaging around the war effort, bundling clips of war movies, SpongeBob SquarePants and video games with images of strikes on Iranian targets.
Atop one such video, White House communications director Steven Cheung posted a sequence of video game controller moves that is a cheat code for unlimited ammunition in a Grand Theft Auto PlayStation game.
To an extent, Trump’s approach may be the latest example of presidents facing a crisis and slipping into the habits that delivered them their electoral victories.
President Bill Clinton liked to triangulate and find the common ground between opposing political wings. Bush jnr would project confidence and double down on whatever proposal he was making. Obama often sought to go in the opposite direction of what Democratic Party elders were suggesting.
Trump is embracing Trump.
The tactic may be building support within a slice of the President’s base. It is less clear that it is winning over sceptics on either side of the political aisle.
“Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip,” Ben Stiller posted on X at the weekend.
“We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie.”
A Washington Post flash poll conducted on the war’s second day found widespread opposition to Trump’s decision among independents and Democrats and a split among Republicans.
Among Republicans, 81% said they supported Trump’s initial decision to strike Iran, but even at that early stage, only 54% of Republicans said they supported continuing the effort.
Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who identify with Trump’s MAGA movement were far more likely than those who don’t identify as MAGA to back Trump’s policy.
Among MAGA Republicans, 54% said they supported continued strikes compared with 13% who said Trump should stop. Those who don’t identify with MAGA split evenly, 32% in favour of continuing and 31% opposed. By comparison, only two in 10 independents and almost no Democrats supported continuing the fight.
Two-thirds of Americans said Trump had not clearly explained the goals of his operation. MAGA Republicans were the exception on that question, as well, with 75% saying he had offered a clear explanation.
Trump has offered Americans a shifting list of goals for the war, at times declaring that he wants Iranians to sweep away their old regime and build a new future.
At other times he said he was inspired to act in Iran following his success in deposing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, an operation that left the old system in place under a new leader who is friendlier to the US.
He has also said he is seeking to destroy Iran’s conventional missile capabilities, its Navy and its nuclear programme.
He has declared that he doesn’t expect the war to be an extended deployment, and that short-term pain will lead to long-term payoff - a calculus that may inform how he is thinking about being a wartime president.
Asked at the weekend whether he was worried about rising petrol prices and the toll on the American economy, he said he wasn’t concerned, given the time frame.
“This is a short excursion into something that should have been done for 47 years - 47 years it’s taken to do this, and no president had the guts to do it,” he said.
A week into the Iraq War in 2003, similar questions were floating about the length of the commitment, which ultimately lasted until the end of 2011, before Obama again deployed troops in 2014 to combat Isis.
“We hope that will be as short as possible, and we can’t make any predictions about exactly how long it will go,” Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters nine days after the start of the invasion.
“We are prepared to fight for whatever period is necessary, whatever period of time is right.”
Trump rose to the presidency partly on the strength of his criticism of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, making his gamble on Iran even more striking, said Suzanne Maloney, a vice-president of the Brookings Institution who focuses on US policy toward Iran.
“He picked up on the frustration of ordinary Americans with the human and financial cost of those wars before the political establishment in Washington fully understood how widely those views were shared among the American public,” Maloney said.
“It’s particularly baffling to me that the President himself seems so disinterested in the actuality and the continuing likelihood of unintended consequences and negative economic and strategic fallout from this conflict,” she said.
When Trump travelled to Dover, he spoke to families for more than an hour. He said he expected he would continue to need to travel to the air base.
“Oh yeah, I’m sure. I hate to tell them. But it’s a part of war, isn’t it?” Trump said. “It’s part of war. It’s a sad part of war. It’s the bad part of war.”
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