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But the devil is in the details.
No one would claim that the Iran War has been a political godsend for President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. But some Israel-First conservatives are willing to say—and lately have been incessantly saying—that the Iran War hasn’t been a political scourge.
Those Israel-First conservatives are wrong, even if the devil is, at least partly, hidden in the details. The Iran War has damaged Trump’s approval ratings, consumed his presidency, and darkened the GOP’s prospects in the upcoming midterm elections.
A chief proponent of the argument that Trump hasn’t suffered all that much from the Iran War is Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire. Shapiro’s political analysis is plainly motivated by the fact that he was a loud and influential proponent of the war who promised—falsely, as it turned out—that Iran couldn’t close the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for the global energy trade.
These days, Shapiro seems to be implicitly acknowledging the war is very unpopular while trying to argue this fact has nothing to do with the declining approval ratings of the president who launched it. We should thank Shapiro, for he has expressed his new argument in such a way as to help us uncover those devilish details that make the Iran War a not-entirely-straightforward story of political calamity.
“There’s an op right now to pretend that the real reason for President Trump’s unpopularity is foreign policy, but that is not true, by the polling data, it is not true,” said Shapiro on a recent episode of his podcast. “The reality is that Americans have affordability concerns, President Trump came into office saying he was going to alleviate the affordability concerns. He has not in fact alleviated the affordability concerns, and therefore, his polling numbers have consistently slid since Liberation Day.”
This is a bit like me saying my wife isn’t mad at me because of the drinking, but because I drunkenly crashed the car.
The Iran War, as everyone now knows, has driven up prices at the pump—prices which, unfortunately for Trump, are prominently displayed on every major street across the country. On the eve of the war, regular gasoline averaged $2.98 per gallon. Today, at the time of writing, the average price is $4.48. Americans are notoriously averse to high gasoline prices and tend to punish presidents over the issue, sometimes even when the president can’t justifiably be blamed.
But make no mistake: Virtually every sentient adult understands that 1) oil comes from the Middle East, 2) Trump started a big war in the region, and 3) gas prices shot up right afterwards. And again, even if Americans didn’t grok the connection between the war and the gas-price spike, the latter would still have hurt Trump politically, and it would still be a knock-on effect of the former.
It’s not just prices at the pump that have gone up because of the war. Groceries and other consumer goods travel across this vast land on tractor-trailers that run on diesel and get a lot fewer miles per gallon than even your Uncle Larry’s F-350. Diesel prices have smashed records and now sit at around $6.50, up from $3.76 before the war.
No wonder truckers are furious, prompting rumors of an imminent strike.
And no wonder the Iran War has contributed to general inflation in America. Anyone who has been reading the official economic reports knows the war is responsible for more than a third of recent inflation.
Before the war, inflation was trending down, only a couple ticks away from the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. It seems likely that Trump, if he hadn’t started his dumb war in the Middle East, would have garnered praise for presiding over declining inflation and that the Fed would have cut interest rates, juicing economic growth. Instead, inflation now sits at 3.4 percent.
(As an aside, this weekend I traveled to Istanbul, where many Middle Easterners of various nationalities complained to me that Americans only oppose the war because of the gas prices. That’s simply not true. The war has been unpopular since day one, when all that Americans knew was the American-Israeli strikes had killed Iranian leaders including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.)
Shapiro, ever the neoconservative, insinuated in the quote above that the decline in Trump’s approval rating owes more to his tariffs than to his war. The data doesn’t back that up, as the conservative commentator and election analyst Ryan Girdusky noted on X in response to new survey data. “The most eye opening part of this poll is that Trump’s approval rating and the strength of the economy went up right after Liberation Day,” Girdusky said. “Fell slightly afterward and then plummeted at the start of the Iran War.”
Shapiro has unwittingly helped uncover another, subtler, way in which the Iran War has indirectly damaged Trump’s approval ratings and, by extension, the Republican Party brand. Shapiro recently went on Fox News to commiserate with the host Mark Levin—another Israel-Firster and warmonger—over all those dastardly antiwar conservatives blaming the Iran War for everything.
“Iran is a 4-percent issue with the American people,” Levin said, as Shapiro nodded in agreement. Levin was referring to Fox News polling that shows not many Americans name the Iran War as their top issue. “So, whatever happens in the midterms, it doesn’t appear that Iran’s going to drive anything one way or another.”
“I think that’s exactly right,” Shapiro replied.
Part of the problem with Levin’s analysis has already been covered above. In the Fox poll, a plurality of Americans—34 percent—named the cost of living as the most important issue, and the Iran War has made living costlier.
But the subtler problem is perhaps even more illuminating. Simply put, Americans believe Trump is too focused on foreign policy at the expense of the problem they really care about, which, in fact, his Iran War has exacerbated. This is a PR disaster for the Trump administration and the GOP. Americans don’t prioritize the war that has dominated the headlines and distracted the White House, even as Trump claims to have boldly prevented Iran from unleashing nuclear apocalypse.
It may be grotesque to find silver linings in this dumb and deadly war, but here’s one: Americans no longer buy the war narratives. That is certainly not, however, a silver lining for Republican candidates in this year’s election, no matter how cynically they try to distance themselves from the war. In fact, it’s a good bet they’ll do much worse than if Trump hadn’t launched this unnecessary war, despite what Shapiro and his ilk may tell you.
The post Yes, the Iran War Has Destroyed Trump’s Presidency appeared first on The American Conservative.
The latest attacks on Vance are clearly and irreducibly about foreign policy.
J.D. Vance has been taking fire of late. From the left, of course—but also from the right, whose remaining “zombie Reaganites” have launched an effort to call his conservative bona fides into question.
Much of this criticism purports to find in Vance nothing more than a camouflaged leftist. Writing of Vance’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience last month, commentator Ben Shapiro said he heard the vice president articulate “Bernie Sanders’ economics, Barack Obama’s foreign policy, and Ro Khanna’s conspiracy theories,” adding that Vance seemed to be “mirror[ing] the Democrats.”
But of these critiques, it is the second—foreign policy—that really animates the “conservative” carpers. It is this original sin that renders Vance untouchable to the old-guard “fusionists” of the right, for whom anything less than total devotion to the War Party and its partners in Israel is an excommunicable offense.
Consider the timing. Conservatism, Inc. began to attack Vance anew when the memorandum of understanding with Iran was signed––in other words, when the Trump administration acknowledged reality and made a move to wrap up a stupid and unwinnable war. Former Bush speechwriter and arch-interventionist Marc Thiessen dubbed it the “Vance deal.” Ultrahawk Max Abrahms accused Vance of not wanting to achieve the goals of the Trump administration in Iran, clearly working to frame Vance as opposed to the president and see Trump scuttle the agreement. Others of a similar bent (Ben Domenech, Brian Kilmeade) similarly tried to pin what they framed as a surrender on Vance.
These critics all wanted to use the vice president as a proxy to attack the deal itself while avoiding a frontal attack on Trump. If things went sideways, they wanted to ensure Vance would be left holding the bag. Heads, hawks win; tails, Vance loses.
It was, of course, all about foreign policy—specifically, Vance’s apparent enthusiasm for realism and restraint and his willingness to entertain the notion that perhaps policing the world and launching endless wars have been bad for America.
What gives the game away is that the economic critiques of Vance could usually be applied with equal justice to President Donald Trump–but rarely are. Shapiro, for example, has been willing enough to tolerate Trump’s frequent forays into economic populism without tarring him as a socialist. With the vice president, though, he has not pulled his punches. Now economics matters.
The difference is that the president gave Ben Shapiro and the Israel lobby the war with Iran they wanted. It seems that Shapiro’s criticism is selective.
But hey, if free markets are Ben Shapiro’s thing, maybe we should introduce him to the most laissez-faire Republican of the last twenty years: Dr. Ron Paul. Maybe the good doctor would be more to his liking?
Alas, it’s not to be. Shapiro spent much of the 2012 election cycle accusing Paul of antisemitism, and even disparaged Trump’s supposed embrace of a “Ron Paul foreign policy” during the 2016 campaign.
Michael Brendan Dougherty recently observed on X that, if the real issue were Vance’s “domestic socialism,” then the devotees of free markets would have spent far more time attacking Marco Rubio in the past few years. Rubio has played up his interest in the tradition of Catholic “distributist” economics during the past few years as part of his perpetual efforts to catch up to the political moment. He even contributed a chapter to a book edited by the famed distributist Dale Ahlquist, where they redub this outlook “localism” and promote it as an alternative to laissez-faire economics. What does Ben Shapiro think about Marco Rubio? This: “Waltz for NSA. Rubio for SecState. I’ve got a fevah, and the only prescription is more winning!”
At least Marco Rubio supports deporting college students who want to boycott Israel? I suppose that’s good enough for Ben.
The objections of Shapiro and others who share his outlook come down irreducibly to foreign policy. It is enough to make one wonder whether one of the legs of fusionism’s famed “three-legged stool”—which brought together foreign policy hawkishness, free-market economics, and social conservatism—was in fact bigger and more important than the others.
Because industrial policy, state involvement in the economy, and debt-funded spending are all fine when it comes to defense.
Ultimately, Vance’s critics are coming after him because he represents a major threat to the interventionism and mindless pursuit of global primacy that has done so much damage to our republic over the past three decades. They are, when it comes down to it, single-issue voters—and that issue is war.
The post All the Vice President’s Critics appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Daily Wire podcaster supported policies that boosted the hard left in New York.
The Democratic Socialists of America won big in New York’s Democratic primaries last Tuesday. By the time the ballots were tallied, conservative media had identified a scapegoat: white people.
Specifically, “overeducated, useless white people,” in the words of the Daily Wire podcaster Ben Shapiro.
Batya Ungar-Sargon—a pro-Trump leftist—wrote a Substack essay with this imperious headline: “Stop Calling Them ‘Socialists.’ They’re Over-Credentialed White Gentrifiers Driven by Resentment Ousting Working-Class Candidates.”
For those not in the know: “White gentrification” is when white people move into an area and make it nicer, “white flight” is when they move away, making it worse, and both phenomena prove how evil white people are.
Ungar-Sargon has some expertise in the evils of white people, having authored a PhD dissertation at U.C. Berkeley that examined “how rape and colonialism contributed to the development of modern English fiction,” according to Wikipedia. So, next time your mom’s snuggled up with a book by Jane Austen, let her know that rapey colonialism made the reading experience possible.
The New York Post also did some white-bashing after the shock elections. “The Young and the Clueless,” blared the cover headline on Thursday, above a photograph of triumphant-looking young people with fists in the air. The subheadline: “Just 7% of voters, mostly white and under 30, pick Israel-hating radicals to represent Dems.”
I’m trying to imagine Shapiro calling out “useless Hispanics,” Ungar-Sargon lamenting “Jewish gentrifiers,” or the Post doing a cover story on “mostly black” street criminals.
I can easily imagine Shapiro hating on Muslims. In fact, I don’t need to imagine. “Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage,” Shapiro once wrote on the hellsite formerly known as Twitter.
It’s pretty rich of Shapiro to blame white people for DSA victories. Any sentient being can see that the Democrats and hard left benefit from the country’s ongoing demographic transformation, i.e., from its becoming less white. Well, anyone but Shapiro can see that. “I don’t give a good damn about the so-called ‘browning of America,’” he wrote in 2017. “Color doesn’t matter. Ideology does.”
At least, that’s how Shapiro conceived of the relationship—or in his view, non-relationship—between ethnicity and nationhood in America. For Israel, things are different. “If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper,” Shapiro wrote two decades ago. “It’s an ugly solution, but it is the only solution.”
Some might even call it the final solution.
While Shapiro’s rhetoric about Muslims may have softened, his views don’t seem to have changed. “I think Israel should have gone harder and faster in Gaza,” Shapiro told Vanity Fair in a profile of him published this week. Should have gone harder and faster in Gaza. Those repulsive words should disqualify Shapiro from ever again opining on U.S. foreign policy.
In sum: Shapiro supports the forcible displacement of non-Jews from Greater Israel, even as he welcomes the dilution of America’s European stock via mass migration. Set aside your own views on those matters: Does this not seem a rather bewildering instance of moral incoherence?
The browning of America about which Shapiro doesn’t give a “good damn” is well apparent in New York City, which was 90 percent white in 1950 and is under 30 percent white today. That Gotham’s immigrant newcomers hail mostly from places outside Europe probably pleases Shapiro, given his views on the superlative importance of ideology. He’s a big booster of David Harsanyi’s book Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.
Unfortunately, since color and ideology are more tightly correlated than Shapiro’s past comments would suggest, and not remotely in the direction he seems to believe, conservative candidates no longer stand a chance in the Big Apple.
In last year’s mayoral election, the moderate Gov. Andrew Cuomo won a majority of whites, yet the Ugandan-born, Indian-American DSA candidate Zohran Mamdani dominated the election thanks to overwhelming support from foreign-born residents, who make up around 37 percent of the city’s population.
From his new throne at Gracie Mansion, Mamdani played kingmaker in last week’s elections, as did the Turkish-American influencer Hasan Piker. They had endorsed the DSA candidates who unseated Democratic incumbents in the U.S. House: Darializa Avila Chevalier, a black Latina, and Claire Valdez, who describes herself as “a dual citizen of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Nation and the United States.” Brad Lander, a former DSA leader backed by the mayor, also won; he’s Jewish. Mamdani and Piker supported candidates down-ballot as well, such as Aber Kawas, a Palestinian-American.
Sorry, why should white people be scapegoated for all this, exactly?
It would make more sense to blame Israel, since its assault on Gaza and out-of-control bellicosity across the Middle East has become a wedge issue within the Democratic Party, to the advantage of upstart socialists taking on an out-of-touch establishment. Given Israel’s plummeting favorability ratings among Americans, left-wing candidates may ride anti-Israel sentiment to more congressional seats and even the White House in the coming years.
Socialism really is on the rise in America, in part due to changing demographics, but in part due also to Israel’s unseemly belligerence. That’s hardly a surprise, though Ben Shapiro never had the foresight to give a good damn. If he’d gotten his way, socialism might have risen only harder and faster.
The post Ben Shapiro Blames ‘Useless White People’ for Socialism appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Iran War is bringing back some of the lowest forms of intellectual dishonesty.
At the beginning of the Iraq War, David Frum published an article in National Review entitled “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” attacking those on the right opposed to the war—including the founders of this magazine, Patrick J. Buchanan, Scott McConnell, and Taki Theodoracopulos. Almost a quarter-century later, Frum’s arguments stand out as particularly lazy and dishonest smears. Almost everyone acknowledges that the Iraq War was a mistake sold to the American people on false pretenses, directly causing the deaths of 460,000 Iraqis and 4,506 American servicemen, destroying Iraq’s ancient Christian community, and replacing a stable government with a power vacuum that has been ripe for sectarianism and terror. Those who opposed the war now stand vindicated, even if many lost their careers due to their opposition to the Iraq War.
But, at the time, the Bush speechwriter chalked their opposition to the war not up to well-thought-out (and later vindicated) analyses of the disaster that the war would bring to the Middle East and the quagmire that it would be for United States, but instead to supposed lack of patriotism and personal opposition to the neoconservatives. “They began by hating the neoconservatives,” Frum wrote, in the part of his article that has become the most infamous. “They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.”
One would expect Frum’s line of argumentation to remain in the dustbin of history. But, in the midst of the current war with Iran, somehow this argument returned. The most noteworthy proponent of this argument—albeit in a more low-brow form—has been Ben Shapiro, the co-founder of the Daily Wire and a popular hawkish podcast host.
“There’s a coalition of people who are uniting to take down the United States,” Shapiro wrote in a recent op-ed, describing people who oppose the Iran War. “These people are cowards, plus liars, plus people who despise America.”
Another line of attack taken by both Frum and Shapiro is to attempt to accuse those on the right opposed to the war of not being real conservatives, as there are some on the left who also happen to oppose the war.
“They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe,” Frum wrote in 2003.
Shapiro has made similar arguments when attacking non-interventionists. For instance, in a December 2025 speech at the Heritage Foundation, Shapiro attacked the prominent conservative media presenter Tucker Carlson for his foreign policy orientation, which, according to Shapiro, “has become essentially indistinguishable from the thought of far-leftists like Noam Chomsky.”
Since the start of the war, Shapiro has continued this, calling those conservatives opposed to the war as being part of the “horseshoe right,” implying that they are somehow in cahoots with the left in opposing a foreign war.
Contra Shapiro, Frum, and others, if anything it is deeply conservative to oppose the war in Iran. America’s great conservative statesmen, from John Randolph of Roanoke to Robert Taft, have been markedly noninterventionist in foreign policy, seeking to preserve the republic bequeathed by the Founders and fighting back against attempts to turn America into an empire that, though (in the words of John Quincy Adams) it “might become the dictatress of the world” would “be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” The principles of geopolitical noninterventionism and neutrality comprised an important part of the American tradition, and anyone who seriously seeks to conserve this tradition will recognize this. While Frum and Shapiro use the label “conservative” to describe themselves, are on matters of foreign affairs utterly disconnected from historical American conservatism.
Shapiro’s arguments, though mirroring Frum’s, are considerably less convincing. Whereas the Iraq War initially had broad support, the current Iran War only has the support of 27 percent of Americans. The original conservative opponents of the Iraq War were a small (though correct) minority, and Frum et al. could write them off as kooks. Today, it is implausible that the majority of Americans who oppose or question the war with Iran are “uniting to take down the United States” or “despise America.”
Shapiro is not the only one to make the argument that conservatives opposed to the Iran War are “anti-American.” The radio host Mark Levin often whines about those he deems to be “isolationists,” calling them “the Woke Reich” (apparently borrowing a phrase from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu). Levin also routinely attacks noninterventionist media figures, such as Carlson—who Levin says “hates America, our Judeo-Christian beliefs, President Trump, and MAGA”—and Steve Bannon, whom he accused of “aiding the enemy” for hosting, Trita Parsi, one of America’s foremost scholars on Iran.
But Shapiro, unlike Levin, is broadly intelligent. He is a Harvard Law graduate; unlike Levin, he does not write books criticizing the “Franklin School” or attacking St. Thomas More for writing a satire titled “Utopia.” One might expect him, as a former supporter of the Iraq War (he wrote an article in favor of invading Iraq in 2001, as a UCLA undergraduate), to have some level of introspection about adventures abroad, or to at least explain to the audience why they should trust him on matters of Middle Eastern war and peace. Instead he is reviving neoconservative canards about war skeptics. We’ll see how that ages.
The post ‘Unpatriotic Conservatives’ Redux appeared first on The American Conservative.
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