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News Analysis
President Trump has excelled at letting supporters hear what they want to hear. But Iran has upended that strategy.
June 20, 2025, 1:33 p.m. ET
When President Trump was pressed this week about his administration’s conflicting messages on mass deportations, he did not offer much clarity.
“Everybody’s right,” he said.
Since his first campaign for president 10 years ago, Mr. Trump has excelled at appearing to favor both sides of the same issue, allowing supporters to hear what they want to hear, whether he’s talking about tariffs, TikTok, abortion, tax cuts or more.
But the prospect that the United States might join Israel in bombing Iran is testing his ability to embrace dueling positions with little to no political cost. Some of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters — those who defended him during multiple investigations and ultimately returned him to the White House — are ripping each other to shreds over the idea, and at times lashing out at Mr. Trump himself, as well.
The war in Iran is exactly the kind of Middle East entanglement that Mr. Trump’s anti-interventionist base believed he was bitterly opposed to, because he repeatedly said he was. But he is also the same president who, in his first term, authorized missile strikes in Syria after its leadership used chemical weapons on citizens, and the assassination of a top Iranian general, Qassim Suleimani — two actions he took pride in.
To Mr. Trump, the contradictions are not actually contradictions.
“I think I’m the one that decides that,” he told The Atlantic recently in response to criticism from one of his most vocal anti-interventionist supporters, Tucker Carlson, who said the president’s support for Israel’s fight in Iran ran against his “America First” message.
Mr. Trump was propelled to victory in the Republican primary in 2016 as an outsider, in part because he forcefully condemned the invasion of Iraq, authorized by the last Republican president more than a decade before, and the seemingly endless war that followed. Yet he said the United States should have taken the country’s oil, and ran radio ads saying he would “bomb the hell” out of the Islamic State.
