Polls in the U. S. show both a lack of support for the Iran War and a diminishing job approval for President Trump because of the war. Both of these proceed from what I’m calling purposefully shifty and grifty language from every form of media about “Middle East Wars.” The plural “wars” instead of “war” intends comparison of the present “Iran War” with previous ones: Iraq, Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan. At a January 6, 2024 Iowa caucus rally, Trump said that his return to the White House would allow the country to “turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars. They never ended.”
Trump, per usual, wasn’t precise in his language. He had something in mind in the spirit of what he thinks related to all of the post-World War 2 wars. In his first term, he didn’t start any new wars, but he did defeat ISIS — was that a war? I don’t remember people complaining so much then. It took 792 days for the U.S.-led coalition to officially declare the 100% defeat of ISIS’s territorial caliphate, during which 21 U.S. service members were killed in hostile action (and 43 in non-hostile for 64 total) under Operation Inherent Resolve. The 21 men dying surpasses this present Operation Epic Fury.
Ending a War, Not Starting a New One
Operation Inherent Resolve from his perspective was ending a war, not starting a new one. Also based on Trump’s own communicated perspective, his present Operation is also ending a war that Iran started 47 years ago in 1979 when it kidnapped 66 Americans at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, and held 52 of those for the entire 444 day crisis. Since then Iran did at least the following:
- The 1980s Embassy & Barracks Bombings: Iranian-backed Hezbollah truck bombs in Beirut killed 17 Americans at the U.S. Embassy and 241 U.S. military personnel at the Marine compound in 1983.
- Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–2011): Official Pentagon data confirms that Iranian-supplied explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) and proxy forces killed 608 U.S. service members in Iraq.
- The Khobar Towers Bombing (1996): An Iran-backed attack on a U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia killed 19 American service members.
- The October 7 Massacre (2023): Iran-backed Hamas terrorists killed 46 Americans and took several others hostage during the initial raids in Israel.
- Pre-2026 Drone & Missile Strikes: Rogue proxy groups carried out over 180 attacks on U.S. regional bases between 2023 and 2025, including the Tower 22 attack in Jordan that killed 3 U.S. soldiers.
Just these bullet points amount to 934 American deaths. How much are those worth to United States citizens? From Trump’s viewpoint, Iran already started a war against the United States. Trump always had one iron-clad, long-standing position that was never ambiguous: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. In 2020, President Trump declared that “as long as he is President of the United States, Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.”
“They Can’t Have Nuclear Weapons”
During his 2024 campaign, Trump said he wished prosperity for Iran but stressed the long-standing Washington red line that the theocracy must not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. He was explicit: “My terms are very easy — they can’t have nuclear weapons.” From the formal press conference with Prime Minister Netanyahu on Feb. 4, 2025, Trump stated:
Today, I also took action to restore a maximum pressure policy on the Iranian regime, and we will once again enforce the most aggressive possible sanctions, drive Iranian oil exports to zero and diminish the regime’s capacity to fund terror throughout the region.
The sequence of events matters here. On April 12, 2025, Iran and the United States began a series of negotiations aimed at reaching a nuclear peace agreement, following a letter from Trump to Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Trump had set a 60-day deadline for Iran to reach an agreement. After the deadline passed, Israel launched strikes against Iran. The administration argues Trump still is the anti-war candidate — that he always exhausts diplomacy before acting, and that projecting overwhelming force is itself a path to lasting peace. The White House fact sheet states:
Upon returning to office, President Trump restored maximum pressure on Iran to deny it all paths to a nuclear weapon and counter its malign influence abroad. In June, after Iran refused to reach a deal with the United States, President Trump authorized Operation Midnight Hammer which obliterated Iran’s nuclear facilities.
War Power Resolution
The Trump administration’s State Department put forward a formal legal justification to answer War Power Act concerns. Its core argument was that this was not a new war but a continuation of an ongoing armed conflict with Iran that has existed since at least June 2025 and even since the 1979 hostage crisis. The State Department argued that the U. S. had been engaged in an ongoing armed conflict with Iran for years, and that genuine but unsuccessful attempts to resolve the conflict through diplomacy did not extinguish the legitimate right of self-defense.
Every president since the enactment of the War Powers Resolution has taken the position that it is an unconstitutional infringement on the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief. What makes Epic Fury different from every prior test is this: it appears to be the first time in the WPR’s 53-year history that the 60-day clock actually influenced an administration’s decision to end combat operations.
As of early May 2026, the White House believes the U.S. and Iran are close to a compact written framework that could end the active fighting and open the door to detailed negotiations. The framework is a one-page, 14-point memorandum of understanding being negotiated by Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. In other words, Trump’s stated endgame is still a deal — not endless war. On his nuclear red line, Trump is consistent that he always promised Iran would not get a nuclear weapon, and he always said military force was on the table as a last resort if diplomacy failed.
The Shifty and Grifty Language About Israel and Iran
Coming from Iran Itself
Okay, so everything I wrote above relates to the first paragraph about shifty and grifty language about Middle Eastern Wars. A huge anti-Israel faction has grown in the United States on the left and the right, which has pushed the narrative that Trump left America First for Israel First to fight Israel’s war for her. The close cooperation with Israel as an ally became convenient to push a story of Israel’s dragging the United States into a war against American interests and illegitimately controlling the government.
The term “Iran” is not in the primary power in Iran right now. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) is the military force for the Islamic Republic of Iran, not an Iranian Republican Guard. These exploited the narrative about Israel immediately. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X:
Mr. Rubio admitted what we all knew: the US has entered a war of choice on behalf of Israel. There was never any so-called Iranian ‘threat.’ Shedding of both American and Iranian blood is thus on Israel Firsters. American people deserve better and should take back their country.
Echoing Grifter Talking Points
Tehran was directly echoing the talking points of American influencers on the right and the left back at Americans. In a May 2026 New York Times interview, Carlson went further, claiming the Iraq War was itself a “product” of “Israel’s interests above America’s interests,” and made similar claims about the Iran war, alleging pressure came from “donors and people with influence over the president.” The business logic is straightforward: controversy drives subscriptions, subscriptions drive revenue, and anti-Israel content — particularly conspiracy content blaming Jewish figures for war — generates enormous engagement.
Progressive lawmakers who have been among the most vocal pushing back against Trump’s agenda — including on the Iran war and Israel — saw a dramatic surge in fundraising. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s analysis found that Western far-left pro-regime accounts usually blamed either Israel or the U.S. for the conflict, with accounts centering Israel’s role often drawing on antisemitic narratives, while those centering the U.S. drew on “anti-imperialist” frameworks — both converging with Iranian state messaging.
The Israel Genocide Shift and Grift
Another useful shiftiness and griftiness corresponds to the question, “Is Israel committing genocide?”, which ties into another question, “Is Israel targeting innocent civilians, especially women and children?” South Africa, acting as an agent of Iran and Hamas, filed a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice on December 29, 2023, alleging Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Israel’s lawyer told the court:
The inevitable fatalities and human suffering of any conflict is not of itself a pattern of conduct that plausibly shows genocidal intent.
The Actual Evidence
Hamas Human Shields
The actual evidence documents instead the following:
1. Hamas’s Deliberate Human Shield Strategy
Hamas used human shields not only incessantly but also systematically and strategically, as a core part of its planning. Seven retired senior U.S. military officers concluded in a detailed analysis that Hamas “transformed the entirety of the Gaza Strip, including civilian buildings, for the purpose of creating Gaza civilian casualties that will be blamed on Israel.” Hamas chose not to build bomb shelters for civilians in Gaza because that would undercut its ability to use the population as human shields.
By putting civilians in or above its military positions, Hamas knew it could not lose: either Israel would be prevented from attacking, or if it did, the civilian casualties would generate international sympathy for Hamas. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), whose mission is to provide relief for Palestinians, has repeatedly found stores of Hamas rockets hidden in tunnels beneath its schools. Even officials of the Palestinian Authority said Hamas was “holding more than two million Palestinian residents hostage and using them as human shields instead of protecting them.”
Casualty Data
2. The Casualty Data Manipulation — A Disinformation Campaign
A peer-reviewed study by professors Lewi Stone and Gregory Rose found that despite claims by Hamas’s Government Media Office that some 70% of fatalities were women and children, figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health itself showed the real rate to be 51%. The researchers stated that Hamas’s declarations of genocide were “inconsistent with its own datasets,” and that data manipulation was possible because many medical directors in the Gazan hospital system were controlled by Hamas.
The researchers found Hamas’s manipulation of statistics was not random. There were systematic efforts to obscure the number of combatants killed, blur lines between civilian and combatant deaths, selectively release information, issue false headline data, inflate civilian death tolls, and create an image of overwhelming victimhood. The New York Times described the start of the Gaza war as releasing “a deluge of online propaganda and disinformation larger than anything seen before.” Russia, China, Iran, and its proxies used state media and covert influence campaigns to support Hamas, undermine Israel, criticize the United States, and cause domestic unrest.
Amplification of Genocide Narrative
The genocide narrative has been actively amplified by:
- Iran and its proxies, as confirmed by the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which called the media environment “an undeclared information war with authoritarian countries.”
- Social media influencers and political activists who gain massive audience growth and revenue from outrage content.
- Some NGOs, which, as the BESA study found, inflated humanitarian needs to spur donations and funding.
- Hamas’s own 1,500-man propaganda corps, which was designed from the outset to weaponize civilian suffering into international political pressure.
The honest picture is this: Hamas deliberately engineered a situation where civilian casualties were maximized and then weaponized casualties as propaganda. That documented strategy fundamentally shapes the context for the casualty figures and the genocide framing — much of which, as the data shows, has been systematically exaggerated or manufactured.
Shifty and Grifty against Israel
U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) has repeatedly accused Israel of genocide and U.S. complicity. In November 2025, she introduced H.Res. 876 recognizing that “Israel has committed the crime of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.” Hers and others statements frame Israel’s operations (involving civilian casualties, including women and children in urban warfare) as deliberate genocide and tie U.S. policy (aid and support) directly to enabling it.
Tucker Carlson has hosted episodes and guests framing Israel’s actions as “mass murder” and questioned U.S. support, with titles/content like “Can You Support Israel’s Genocide in Gaza and Still Be Conservative?” He has highlighted civilian deaths (including women and children) and argued U.S. policy enables it, positioning it against America First principles. Candace Owens (another right-leaning commentator often aligned with populist/right-wing audiences) has also stated opposition to what she calls genocide/ethnic cleansing in Gaza, describing it as “a real holocaust” involving mass killing of civilians/children and criticizing U.S./Israeli policy.
Legal definitions of genocide require specific intent to destroy a group — not just high civilian tolls in warfare against an enemy that embeds among civilians, uses human shields, and initiated the conflict with the Oct. 7 massacre. No international court has issued a final ruling confirming genocide by Israel, and many analyses reject the label as lacking proof of intent while ignoring Hamas’s responsibility. No proof exists backing the claims of deliberate policy to “kill women and children.”
Conclusion
Grifters exploit fatigue from previous wars, framing limited strikes and ceasefire-phase operations either as a broken “no new wars” promise or an endless quagmire. They weaponize narratives like “regime change failure” or civilian incidents (e.g., school strikes) for political attacks. Legacy media frames coverage negatively, emphasizing risks, costs, and unpopularity over the nuclear prevention rationale, while partisan/activist outlets and influencers on the left amplify extremes with their narrative of genocide and U.S. complicity and on the right with their America First isolationism.
Figures across the spectrum gain audience/favor by criticizing Trump — left for “warmonger,” right for betraying non-interventionism. They also proclaim, “Trump’s war causing higher prices,” an easy, visceral narrative, regardless of Iran’s role in closure of the Strait of Hormuz or long-term benefits of neutralizing the threat. Opportunists manipulate information flows with selective stats from contested sources, emotional imagery, or “genocide” hyperbole in order to paint Trump as reckless rather than decisive on stopping a core threat of nuclear proliferation. A fragile ceasefire phase as of May 2026 keeps the issue alive for ongoing exploitation.
Anyone reading here should recognize the reality of manipulation. As I see it, the left wants the power to return to its former status quo with all of its anti-God and unbiblical depravation and delusion. The right dovetails with the left in its hatred of Israel. It is important to keep a clear mind about what is really at stake here.