Bombing Iran is not going to erode Donald Trump’s support in a society that revolves around grievance. After all that hath been said and done, to believe that anything will do so is fool’s gold

Following the attack on Iran, I am yet again watching my fellow Trump detractors, on social media and elsewhere, put far too much faith in the American people as a whole. For years now, something big happens that would ruin any other politician, and they swear this is finally the end for Trump. No — even when he was defeated and sent into exile for four years, he still dominated the headlines and dictated public discourse. They keep underestimating the strength of the hold this one charismatic man hath upon the collective psyche of the country. If the general public is not in revolt now, when it is reasonably obvious that the president committed unspeakable crimes against minors on Epstein’s island — never mind having blatantly orchestrated a coup attempt, grossly mismanaged the worst public-health crisis in a century, attempted to kneecap the world’s largest economy with brain-dead policies, and appointed an anti-vaxxer lunatic to oversee public health — then they are not going to revolt over a conflict on the other side of the world. Not this country. Not these people.

Americans, historically, fall into lockstep the moment a fresh war or conflict breaks out. The Iraq War was massively popular before it was massively unpopular. Isolationism was a default posture for a vast swathe of the public right up to the morning of 7 December 1941 — then, in an instant, it became non-existent. This reflex is not new: the American people, in the aggregate, are sheep. They do what they are told, and they always have.

Roughly sixty to seventy-five per cent of Americans either fervently support Trump; or support him begrudgingly because he is not a Democrat; or possess some personal and/or financial interest in doing so; or—most commonly—do not care and simply look the other way (i.e. they are apolitical). Only about a quarter, at most a third, actively and vocally disapprove of Donald Trump.

So no: if his extreme megalomania and narcissism (I hate to use that grossly overused word, but it fits in his case), his paedophilia, treason, racism, economic malfeasance, felony convictions, and the wider menagerie of criminality and cruelty barely raise an eyebrow with the vast majority of Americans, then bombing Iran is not going to do it either.

And of the roughly thirty per cent or so who eagerly support this regime, they do so for one reason: they are granted licence to hate other Americans. Period. They will bear economic hardship for it—and they already have. They may not like the country being dragged into another foreign conflict, but it is not a dealbreaker. Nothing is a dealbreaker so long as that permission to hate remains intact.

People are really this awful. That is the hardest lesson we have been forced to learn over the past ten years. And we are not getting out of this hellhole any time soon. —Arthur Newhook, 1 March 2026.

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.