26.06.2025

Nowhere else to go

Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran was a predictable betrayal of his pitch to voters. But, asks Paul Demarty, who else are they to vote for? Especially when it comes to elections, memories are short

As widely expected, Donald Trump decided to join Israel’s war of aggression against Iran over the weekend. A combined wave of bunker-buster bombs and cruise missiles hit Iran’s core nuclear facilities. Not two days later, after a polite Iranian retaliation, Trump succeeded - despite Israel’s best efforts - in ramming through a ceasefire. (“They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” a plainly irritated Trump told reporters about his bellicose Israeli and Iranian ‘partners’.)

One relatively minor subplot to this drama is that it would seem, in spite of peace later breaking out, to represent a betrayal of Trump’s supporters. His platform in international politics during his various election campaigns was straightforward: he would not start any new Middle East wars; he would get America out of the region, all the better to confront China in the far east, which he considered a far more serious ‘threat’ than Iran. Such a position was hardly stupid, of course: China is a peer rival to the US; Iran is a significant power in the region, but no more. America’s antipathy towards the Islamic Republic is partly a matter of old wounds and unavenged humiliations, and partly one of backing its own favoured regional strongmen - Israel and Saudi Arabia - against a regime that these latter considered a threat. (The Saudis have recently defrosted their relations with Tehran, however.)

Trump appealed to an isolationist instinct in parts of the American populace, fed by decades of disaster in the ‘war on terror’. It was not principled, but transactional. Why should the US spend so much money on defending Europe? Why couldn’t the Europeans pay their own way? And, above all, why should American lives be wasted in the pursuit of quixotic and unachievable aims in the Gulf?

Yet it was not only war-weary, rust-belt Americans who backed Trump, but the Israeli right. Bibi Netanyahu plainly preferred to have him in the White House than any given Democrat. Israeli ‘interference’ in US elections frankly dwarfs any efforts made by the Russians, though it is passed over in polite silence by a pliant media class. Netanyahu plainly rated his chances highly of dragging the US president along with him, wherever he wanted to go. There was always a contradiction there, which played out in rapid succession from Operation Midnight Hammer to the June 24 ceasefire.

Popularity

There can be no doubt that Trump’s decision to get directly involved, however briefly, has hurt his popularity with his own base. His approval ratings have taken a hit. At the upper reaches of the Maga movement, splits are equally obvious.

Tucker Carlson, the far-right broadcaster, conducted a brutal interview with Ted Cruz, the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, on the Israel-Iran war, in which he did an admirable job of showing Cruz up as the bigoted buffoon that he is. This was plainly a proxy battle against those forces in the government pushing for a US intervention in this war. In the event, it appears it was far too late. The US and Israel had been discussing this operation for months, even simulating the attacks that ultimately took place. The whole process of US ‘negotiations’ with Iran that took place over the last couple of months turns out to have been just one of a number of ‘options’. Carlson considers this ‘backstabbing’ the epitome of smart politics.

Indeed, that was precisely the justification offered by vice-president JD Vance to waverers: “I empathise with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of wars in the Middle East,” he told NBC’s Meet the press. “But the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents. And now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.”

It would not be a good use of time to refute this claim in any depth. One objection that jumps right out at you is that, for four of those 25 years, the dumb president in charge was a certain Donald J Trump. If it truly was his overriding objective to disengage from all these “dumb” wars, why did he not disengage from any of them? He negotiated withdrawal from Afghanistan, but kicked the can down the road until it was Joe Biden’s problem. Was he not supposed to be the decisive, strong and very smart man who would sort all this out?

The truth is that Trump is strong relative to his political supporters and rivals within the Republican Party, who have proved unable to replace him. Yet, despite his self-presentation, he is weak-willed. He is easily manipulated by his associates; indeed, he is so easily manipulated that it is difficult to get any sustained policy out of him, since rival courtiers can easily push him between different courses. He is in one respect pathetically beholden to public opinion, fearing to do anything that could allow enemies to present him as “weak”. Thus he is easily talked out of de-escalation, and talked into adventures like this week’s bombing runs (and, in his first term, the assassination of Qasem Soleimani). It is plausibly the fact that he has been made to look foolish and pliable by Netanyahu that led to his later volte face.

For those Trump supporters who really had hopes for an end to these hopeless entanglements, there is a choice: stick or twist. Among the most ideologically committed, this is a choice about loyalty to the man or to the programme. For Carlson, it seems, the programme won - not altogether surprising, since he is known to have privately expressed contempt for Trump. (Carlson is a New England ‘blue blood’; vulgar wheeler-dealers from the outer boroughs are not really his style.) For others, loyalty wins out. It is hardly surprising to see Vance come onside, since he is after all a member of the administration and moreover a craven lickspittle - but others could be named from the Maga mediasphere. The deep vein of hatred among rightwing Americans for Iran will help them swallow the humiliation.

Swing votes

It is all too easy, however, to fall into the trap of viewing Trump’s support through the lens of his hardcore fans. They are, after all, so spectacularly detestable (or deplorable, indeed, as Hillary Clinton would say).

Yet much of Trump’s vote is in fact strangely passive. It is counterintuitive, given how much political energy has been invested in treating Trump as a world-historic ogre, but there it is. He activates non-voters at a much higher rate than his mainstream opponents. These voters, when polled last year, typically had a vague sense that the economy was ‘bad’ and it would be better if somebody ran America ‘like a business’. They want the border ‘under control’, without showing any great appetite for mass deportations. They may have chafed against political correctness, without having thereby had their souls eaten by the anti-woke hysteria got up by the far right. They are cynical about America’s pretensions to global moral leadership. They are predominantly young and male, and have no more than a high-school education.

These are the people who swung the key states for him. Vance’s pablum about “dumb presidents” was not for Tucker Carlson’s benefit, but for them. Their attraction to Trump, on this basis, was not wholly senseless. As people on relatively low incomes, they will have been hit harder by inflation than many, and suffered under many other economic pressures wholly alien to the Democrats’ most passionate supporters, who are now college-educated and tend to live in the big cities. Their communities are more likely to furnish the soldiers whose job it will be, in the end, to die for the follies of the Washington foreign-policy elite.

Fix it

It may seem foolish to expect Trump to fix any of this (certainly now) - but then it was absolutely certain that Hillary Clinton and then Kamala Harris were not going to fix it. They had no interest in doing so. What exactly was Harris’s pitch to voters, anyway? Can anyone say without desperately Googling for 10 minutes? For a time, it seemed merely to be that people should show gratitude that they were fortunate enough to live in the same world as her.

Even if you did not really believe Trump’s promises, you might fairly say that there was a five percent chance he would ‘fix’ everything. Five is a bigger number than zero. And only something from outside the perfectly honed political machines of the major parties could be said to have any chance at all. (For this reason, Bernie Sanders often polled better head-to-head with Trump than Clinton and other ‘moderate’ Democrats, though it is doubtful that this would have continued in a general election.)

The trouble is that you would still be wrong, as indeed Trump’s passive support has turned out to be. This is no matter of contingency. The idea of a strong man sweeping aside corrupt and incompetent elites is an enduring one, but has proven itself time and again illusory. No large-scale society can be governed truly autocratically: the new leader needs his own caste of elites to actually do the job, which will usually be sourced from within the existing political class anyway. Even with a true purge, those who replace the old swamp-dwellers will quickly prove to be as corrupt and incompetent (perhaps more so), given how high a price is placed on obedience and personal loyalty under such regimes. So it turns out that defence secretary Pete Hegseth is no less a warmonger than his Democrat predecessors - merely less sober; and so on.

In the various election post-mortems that followed Trump’s victory last year, Democrat elites frequently grumbled about the influence of ‘low-information voters’, in a way that seemed to imply that we are all born as ‘high-information’, and are merely pushed out of this prelapsarian condition by the machinations of bad actors. In truth, the strong-man illusion is endemic to a society that pretends to be democratic, while in fact assigning the functions of government to professional elites in the interests of capital-owners - and all the more so to a society whose great electoral contest is over a monarchical presidency.

It is true that the voters I described do not have the requisite political education to act consistently in their own interests. Yet what could actually provide such an education? Not better civics classes, or more thorough censorship of ‘misinformation’, but ongoing political engagement, itself in a context where the real structures of power are unveiled and put properly in question.

That is the job of a party, and a real one, rather than the bureaucratically administered campaigning apparatuses running things in DC. It is the vigorous internal life of a democratically organised party that - through involving members in choices between candidates, officials and programmes, and the debates pertaining to these choices - can get us to a higher aggregate level of political intelligence. In so doing, of course, party organisation solves the ‘old elite’/‘new elite’ problem: ordinary members are trained in the kind of decision-making required in administration, and so set in train the withering away of the professionalised administrative state altogether.

Of course, it only makes sense to build such an organisation if your goal really is to drastically flatten the hierarchies of society at large. The first such parties were working class organisations, with bourgeois equivalents springing up in response; with the decline of the workers’ movement, all such parties have steadily fallen under the control of the bureaucracy. The creation of a truly democratic political culture in the United States, as in every other country, therefore falls to the socialist left, who may not succeed immediately in making inroads into the passive Trump vote, but could in time, if it built a truly functional, principled party.

Without that, the result of Trump’s backstabbing will be further alienation and ultimately despair. As the last week’s events show, the stakes could not be higher.