Many critics of President Donald Trump, who did not approve of the order for Operation Epic Fury, have focused on his inability to “rally the public” for the battle with Iran, which the United States and Israel have been waging – extremely successfully – for more than a month. Last night he gave the prime time speech some of his critics called for.
However, this column was due hours before the president spoke, so I can only predict that, with any confidence, reactions to the speech will be “mixed.”
About 35-40% of the country will welcome the comments. About the same number will condemn them. And the crucial middle 20-40% will either be ‘undecided’ or admit they haven’t seen it.
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This result will come about because opinions about President Trump and everything he does have little or no influence. Ever.
The president has built a base. It holds up. When the president faced Vice President Kamala Harris in an actual vote, he smoked her and won decisively in all seven of the swing states. That was a real test.
The next time public opinion will really be tested will be the autumn elections. So much will happen between then and now that the safest prediction remains: the Republican Party will lose the majority in the House of Representatives but retain the majority in the Senate, but it’s all a matter of throwing arrows. If the president has a silent communication from one or two members of the Supreme Court in his pocket, he can be assured of a few news cycles favorable to him before the voting begins, as the left will do its very predictable and ridiculous overreaction to each candidate and alienate the center.
But about the address last night…
President Trump will have rightly praised the work of the US military and our Israeli partners. The combined forces have devastated Iran’s ability to threaten its neighbors and the world. A military junta now runs the country, if the smartest analysts are to be believed, and even if Khamenei 2.0 is still alive but injured, it doesn’t matter. It is very clear that he is not “leading” anything. It’s not even clear that the junta controls anything.
There’s not much a devastated army can do other than fire whatever missiles they can drag out of the shattered caverns and fire them “in ones and twos,” to quote Central Command’s combatant commander, Admiral Brad Cooper. Israeli news is full of leaks about how the IDF is running out of targets. It would be remarkable if America wasn’t too. That doesn’t mean the junta isn’t capable of killing its own people. It just means that the Islamic Republic of Iran no longer threatens the region and the world.
The region and the world are so much better off today than they were five weeks ago that it is very difficult to describe how big the change is. There is still work to be done by some of our military forces, but hats off to the Pentagon planners, the frontline warriors and everyone in between, for it has been a dominating and stunning display of America’s military might. Our most important ally, Israel, has shown – again – that when a deadly battle looms, you want Israel on your side.
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No matter what President Trump said last night, those invested in hating him will join Democrats invested in winning the election this fall in finding criticism for the speech. That’s fine. That is America in 2026. We never take a break in our endless political battles.
That’s why there were so many skeptics initially about the need for the great “Oval Office” speech of old, including myself.
Consider Richard Nixon’s “Great Silent Majority” speech of November 3, 1969, in which he laid out his policy of Vietnamizing that war. With that address Nixon bought himself time and support. About 70 million people watched that speech, and more than three in four approved of it. That was a speech that stirred public opinion for a while.
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I didn’t expect anything like this from President Trump’s speech. Americans today are much more fixed in their political views, and have been that way for a long time. That’s what ‘polarization’ means.
We consume news collectively so very differently than we did over fifty years ago, and while many of us will get dozens of clips and snippets of the speech from various social media feeds, it is difficult for a single or even multiple Beltway “analysts” to distort the speech one way or another. The ‘elites’ of American public opinion are simply no longer there. The New York Times’ response, much less that of network news, matters little.
What counts now are the results. Americans are closely following the battle with the mullahs and the Islamic Republic’s new Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps junta. But where you sit determines what you see and hear. The center-right to conservative half of America doesn’t care at all about the popular messages of the traditional media, which have near-single digit credibility with “the great silent majority.” The president’s 77 million voters tend to approve of his actions, and serious national security practitioners are already cheering that the Iranian threat has been removed.
‘Normal’ people would also welcome the fall of the junta and that could happen. Everyone who buys gas also wants oil to flow freely through the Strait of Hormuz again. Since the answer to the problem of high prices is in fact more production from other sources, this will also happen if cross-strait oil production from the Gulf is actually cut back for much longer. The president knows that the average American hates high gas prices. He will urge Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and everyone on the National Energy Dominance Council to move even faster. And they will. Gas prices have likely peaked and will not fall steadily.
Crucially, the threat of nuclear weapons surrounded by tens of thousands of long-range ballistic missiles, all in the hands of religious fanatics, is now virtually zero for the foreseeable future. Israel will now keep an eye on Iran’s fragmented army. If it has to, it will happen again. Precedents are important. A very visible and lasting precedent has been set.
The world saw the bared teeth of Iran’s religious fanatics when they murdered tens of thousands of their own people in January, and again when it struck wildly at everyone within firing range, and also when it fired missiles at Diego Garcia – demonstrating a reach the old regime swore again and again they did not have.
The remnants of the regime have been exposed and humiliated and are in secret offices, at least indoors and probably deep underground, where they operate in secret for fear of assassination. They sit uncomfortably atop a government that is running out of money and serious weapons. The public in Iran hates them. Maybe the junta will last a year or two. Maybe not. But Iran is on the path to liberation from its medieval madmen. Good luck to the great Iranian people and their desire to be free.
The only question I had going into Wednesday night’s speech was whether the president would announce that America is done with NATO.
NATO has been the most successful military alliance in history, but its most prominent members have only been exposed to the world’s eyes. The frontline countries that share borders with Russia, such as Bulgaria, Finland, Poland and of course Ukraine, are valuable allies. But the rest of Europe? Turns out that gratitude for saving us first from Hitler and then from the Soviet Union had an expiration date. It’s expired.
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NATO’s failure is not President Trump’s fault. NATO member states could have supported or at least encouraged America and Israel (as the Gulf states in fact did). NATO members chose not to do so. It was a choice with great consequences, one that even the “peace through strength” hawks of the Reagan era saw and absorbed. It is time for the new realism in America to become reality over the sclerotic European powers.
The key point: The United States has won a major and lasting victory over an evil regime. It cost at least thirteen American lives and seriously injured people. Those are enormous costs. There may be more victims. To serve in uniform or in our intelligence community too often does harm. We citizens cannot repay these families, but we can and must honor and help them.
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But the world and America are much better off today than they were five weeks ago. Much, much better off. Failing to recognize this reality means proclaiming ignorance about how the world works and how dangerous Iran was five weeks ago. However the speech went Wednesday night, President Trump has already fulfilled a key promise that every president since George W. Bush has made: Iran would never join the club of “nuclear powers.”
Many Americans are already grateful for the president’s decisive action. Historians will respect this choice, regardless of what Wednesday night’s polls say about the speech.
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