In the days since President Donald Trump started a war with Iran, right-wing media have argued that Trump did not start a war with Iran, but
Reed McMaster at MMFA:
In the days since President Donald Trump started a war with Iran, right-wing media have argued that Trump did not start a war with Iran, but rather he is ending a “forever war.” Some have claimed the U.S. has “been at war” with Iran since the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, while others suggested that bombing Iran is an extension of Trump’s promise to bring peace because the conflict could create “peace in the region."
The Trump administration is struggling to sell their war with Iran
On February 28, Trump announced that the U.S. was conducting “major combat operations” in Iran. In a social media post announcing the strikes, President Trump accused Tehran of waging an “unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder targeting the United States,” and cited the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. [CNN, 3/1/26; BBC, 3/3/26]
Trump's decision to go to war with Iran is a direct violation of campaign promises he made in 2016 and 2024. As New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker noted, Trump in 2016 “promised to stop racing to topple foreign regimes,” and in 2024 “boasted of starting ‘no new wars.’” Baker then added, “Mr. Trump is racing to topple foreign regimes, and is sending American sons and daughters to wage another war in the Middle East. The self-declared ‘president of PEACE’ has chosen to become the president of war.” [The New York Times, 2/28/26]
MAGA media has erupted into bitter infighting over the conflict, with notable figures like Tucker Carlson calling it “absolutely disgusting and evil.” [Media Matters, 3/2/26]
Americans are largely critical of the decision to enter war with Iran, with early polls showing nearly 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of taking military action in the country. As Axios notes, “If early polling is any indication, the White House's reasoning isn't resonating with Americans.” [Axios, 3/4/26]
Right-wing media pundits push the bizarre lie that Donald Trump’s war in Iran is “ending” war, not starting a new one.
Marc Thiessen on fatal border patrol shooting: Local Dems "are to blame for all of this," and are "assuming the worst of our patriotic ICE a
On Fox, Washington Post's Mark Thiessen immediately jumps to blame Dem politicians: “I think Minneapolis, and the governor, and the mayor are to blame for all of this”
From the January 24, 2026, edition of Fox News' Saturday in America
Marc Thiessen on fatal border patrol shooting: Local Dems "are to blame for all of this," and are "assuming the worst of our patriotic ICE a
This is definitely one of Kyle's best episodes, to date.
Will Porter returns to Foreign Policy Focus to debunk Marc Thiessen's article in the Washington Post. The article is linked here so you can follow along. Will and Kyle take down the article and expose several common lies about US interventionism.
Will's notes for today's show can be found here. [Link] Will's notes provide citations for his arguments.
Read more at http://foreignpolicyfocus.libsyn.com/fpf-72-debunking-a-washington-post-neocon#ZiCX4RHvB2XH5dYq.99
Congress didn’t authorize this war, and the only response to questions is a loyalty test we’ve fallen for before.
Parker Molloy at The Present Age:
Marc Thiessen, the former chief speechwriter for George W. Bush, posted on X this week. He just can’t understand the logic, he wrote, of Democrats “siding with Iran.”
That’s the whole thing, right there, in one sentence. If you oppose the war, you are siding with the enemy. If you think the president should have gotten congressional authorization before launching Operation Epic Fury, you are siding with the enemy. If you note that Trump’s own Defense Intelligence Agency contradicted his stated justification for the strikes, you are siding with the enemy. There is one acceptable position, and it is total agreement. Everything else gets filed under treason or something like it.
Trump, for his part, said the same thing louder. “What most people understand is that they are only complaining BECAUSE I DID IT,” he wrote on Truth Social Monday night, going after Democrats who’ve criticized the strikes. “The fact is, whatever I do, they will be on the opposite side. These people are SICK, CRAZY, and DEMENTED.”
Thiessen says it in pundit-speak. Trump says it in all caps. Both saying the same thing: get in line.
If you’ve been alive for the last 25 years, you’ve heard this before. You’ve probably heard it from some of the same people. And if you know who Marc Thiessen is, the déjà vu is about to get very specific.
The script
Here’s how this works. It’s the same every time. A president launches a military operation without congressional approval. Critics raise objections. Maybe it’s about legality. Maybe it’s about strategy. Maybe it’s about the fact that the justification doesn’t hold up. The specifics vary, but the next part doesn’t.
Supporters skip past the objection entirely and go straight to motive. You’re not questioning the war. You’re siding with the enemy. “Siding with Iran.” “Maduro supporter.” “Saddam lover.” Pick your era, fill in the blank.
Now the critic is on defense. They have to prove they’re not rooting for the bad guy before anyone will engage with what they actually said. So they lead with a concession. “Of course, Iran is terrible, BUT...” “Obviously, Maduro is a dictator, BUT...” They’re trying to clear a loyalty checkpoint before getting to their point.
But the concession does something worse than fail. By opening with “Iran is bad,” the critic has already accepted the terms of the argument. They’ve agreed that the question on the table is whether Iran is bad. And once that’s the question, the answer is obvious, and anything you say after “but” sounds like an asterisk on something everyone already agrees about. The real questions (did the president lie about the justification? is this legal? does the public support it?) never get asked because the critic just spent their opening statement answering a question nobody actually disagreed about.
The pattern
President George W. Bush gave the modern framework its catchphrase. On September 20, 2001, standing before a joint session of Congress, he told the world: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Six weeks later, at a press conference with French President Jacques Chirac, he boiled it down: “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.”
That framework helped sell both the immediate response to 9/11 and the Iraq War, which was built on claims about weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be false. Iraq cost the United States trillions of dollars and the lives of more than 4,000 American service members and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The framework did its job.
Marc Thiessen was there for all of it. He joined the Bush administration in 2001 as chief speechwriter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, working out of the Pentagon. He was in the building when it was hit on September 11. He later moved to the White House, eventually becoming Bush’s own chief speechwriter. He spent years crafting the language that told Americans to pick a side or be sorted into the enemy camp.
The same guy
So here’s where Thiessen is now: Washington Post columnist. Fox News contributor. And the author of Courting Disaster, a 2010 book arguing that the CIA’s use of waterboarding was effective, lawful, and moral. That last one is worth keeping in mind. When Thiessen talks about America’s moral authority abroad, remember that he wrote an entire book defending torture.
[...]
Two different Democratic leaders. Same structure. Open by accepting the administration's premise, then pivot to process. Schumer's version has the literal 'but.' Jeffries doesn't need one. The pivot does the work on its own.
There are Democrats who skip the concession, and their statements come across a lot stronger. Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Marine veteran, called it “a war of choice without congressional authorization.” No “Iran is bad, but.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren went further. She called the war “dangerous and illegal” and said it was “built on lies.” That last phrase matters. “Built on lies.” That’s the message. Not “the president should have asked Congress first.” The war is built on lies.
The Democratic response is a spectrum, from Schumer’s full concession to Warren’s near-miss. But none of them do what their own voters already believe: this war is wrong, the justification is a lie, and it should stop. The administration would love for the question being debated to be “is the Iranian regime bad?” Schumer and Jeffries appear to be okay with the question being “should the president have asked permission?” But the question the public is already answering is “should this be happening at all?” Jack Roush at the London School of Economics’ US Politics blog made the same comparison to 2004, when John Kerry tried to criticize the Iraq War’s management without opposing its underlying mission and got outflanked from both sides.
The throat-clearing might actually make the administration’s framing stronger. When Schumer says “Iran must never get nukes” before pivoting to authorization, he’s agreeing with the administration’s stated premise for the war. He’s just disagreeing about whether the president needed to ask permission first. To anyone listening casually, the Democratic position sounds like: we agree that something needs to be done, we just wish you’d asked us first. That’s not what three out of every four Democratic voters think. They oppose the war. But their elected representatives are so afraid of being sorted into the wrong side of the binary that they lead with concessions designed to preempt the accusation. And in doing so, they accept the frame. “Iran is terrible, but” isn’t going to stop Trump and guys like Thiessen from calling Democrats traitors, anyway.
Cheerleaders of Trump’s Iran War have a “with us or against us” attitude, not too dissimilar to the 9/11 aftermath and Bush 43’s war with Iraq.
The right-wing hawks who applauded Donald Trump for launching the war with Iran earlier this year are adopting a new argument to avoid criticizing the president as he fumbles toward enacting a weaker, piecemeal version of the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal he once decried. According to their theory, the current negotiations are a sham: Trump is merely laying off the Iranian regime temporarily to forestall Republican defeat in the midterms and will resume hostilities after the November elections.
Iran’s obvious and expected counterstroke of closing the Strait of Hormuz in response to U.S. and Israeli military strikes succeeded in hamstringing the global energy and fertilizer trade, sending prices soaring. Now Iran’s regime is intact and in control of its nuclear materials and ballistic missile stockpile, and the U.S., having failed to achieve the administration’s stated war goals, is negotiating surrender terms that will leave it in a weaker geostrategic position than before the war began.
“You go back to January, shipping was moving, Iran's nuclear program had been bombed six months before and was largely destroyed,” former NATO Ambassador Kurt Volker said on Fox News last week. “We launched this war, the global economy took a big hit. Oil prices skyrocketed. Now we're winding this down but we have Iran now emboldened to exercise some kind of control over the Strait of Hormuz.”
While MAGA’s hacks are eager to praise any deal as an historic victory for Trump and downplay the implications of the memorandum of understanding he signed with Iran, the movement’s hawks recognize that these negotiations are, as The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro put it, “a disaster.”
Over the last week, the hawk faction has scrambled for a response that doesn’t risk their own MAGA audiences by directly attacking Trump. Many have turned their vitriol on Vice President JD Vance for his role in the negotiations, absolving the president of responsibility for the document that he signed and publicly describes as “a very strong deal.”
But another argument recently adopted by right-wing hawks posits that the MOU is effectively meaningless because Trump is negotiating in bad faith. In this telling, the president only agreed to the MOU in order to bring down the cost of gas and thus boost the GOP’s standing in the midterm elections — and after they pass, he will order the U.S. military to resume its attack on Iran.
This argument has some benefits for the hawks:
It doesn’t require them to admit they made a mistake in supporting the war with Iran.
It doesn’t require them to criticize Trump.
It lets them wave away whatever emerges from the U.S.-Iran negotiations.
It buys them time to once again talk the president into military action through his TV.
Fox host Mark Levin, the shrill-voiced megahawk, and network contributor Hugh Hewitt, a higher-brow Sean Hannity, got this argument going on Thursday, as The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last noted.
Right-wing pro-Iran war hawks such as Hugh Hewitt and Mark Levin move the goalposts.
Media figures in right-leaning spaces are bickering about President Donald Trump’s war on Iran. The strikes so far have reportedly killed mu
Noah Dowe, Zachary Pleat, and Gideon Taaffe at MMFA:
Media figures in right-leaning spaces are bickering about President Donald Trump’s war on Iran. The strikes so far have reportedly killed multiple Iranian leaders and many civilians; three American service members have reportedly been killed in action, more seriously wounded, and Trump said that there likely will be more casualties.
Many prominent right-wing figures spoke out in praise of the war. Ben Shapiro praised Trump as “the most courageous commander in chief.” Marc Thiessen called Trump “one of the most consequential commanders in chief in American history.” Mark Levin gushed over the “humane” war. And one Fox guest even suggested that the war “could qualify him once again for a Nobel Peace Prize.”
However, a wide variety of streamers and podcasters have broken with the administration, with Tucker Carlson calling the decision “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Streamer Adin Ross called it “really fucking stupid.”
Other examples of commentary from right-leaning spaces include:
“The MAGA movement is surely dead.”
“This is supposed to be America first. We're not supposed to be running around doing this anymore. But here we are.”
“You see Fox and you see all these haters of Trump, and they're glazing President Trump. They're over the top in the same cheerleading you saw about the Iraq War, particularly in the first days. And remember, folks, you got a long way to go on this thing.”
“I’m not happy about the whole thing. I don’t think this was in America’s interests.”
“I do think it matters politically that he was the no-more-endless-wars candidate in 2016 and 2024, particularly, and this looks like an open betrayal of the base.”
Meanwhile some figures, including Fox host Mark Levin and the panel on PBD Podcast, have been criticizing those who have expressed any opposition to the war.
MAGA media divided in their reactions to the unlawful war against Iran by Donald Trump.
The Mark Levin/Ben Shapiro/Sean Hannity wing cheering it, while the Stephen Bannon/Megyn Kelly/Tucker Carlson/Nick Fuentes wing are opposing it.
The right-wing media’s debate over the reported memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran provides a test of whether, 10 years after President Donald Trump first took power, his supporters are still capable of independent thought. Some of the biggest names in MAGA propaganda are failing it.
The framework agreement Trump and Vice President JD Vance reportedly signed virtually on Sunday appears to leave the U.S. in a worse geostrategic position than before they launched the war with Iran in February — but the full terms of the U.S. surrender are unclear because the actual text of the memorandum has yet to be released. Trump said Monday that the American people won’t be able to see the “very powerful document” that he’s already signed on their behalf until “sometime after Friday,” when a formal signing event is scheduled. Vance, meanwhile, has been on a media tour purporting to describe in detail the contents of the agreement that he signed, which he claims is “about a page and a half” long and a “very general” document.
If you have two functioning neurons to rub together, this seems very suspicious. Why is Vance going on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show to talk up the MOU — while complaining that the U.S. press is adopting “talking points and propaganda” from the Iranian regime “that has no support in the text of the agreement that we've actually negotiated” — rather than simply putting out the document so the public can see it? Are the terms supposed to be so good for the U.S. that we’re worried about embarrassing Iran?
The lack of disclosure is raising concerns among some of MAGA’s hawks, who supported launching the war and prefer to see further escalation rather than an agreement that ends the conflict.
In the debate over the new Iran Deal MOU, MAGA hacks like Benny Johnson gave praise to the new MOU without understanding its contents.
Marc Thiessen declared on social media that he’s no longer an ‘outlier’ at the Washington Post, as the paper’s opinion section is wholly ‘co
Justin Baragona at The Independent:
Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen said the quiet part out loud this week when he bragged that the newspaper’s opinion section was now thoroughly “conservative” after Donald Trump praised his most recent op-ed.
Thiessen’s declaration comes on the heels of billionaire owner Jeff Bezos imposing an ideological realignment of the Post’s opinion page, which has resulted in an exodus of talent and the hiring of an editor who shares his vision of dedicating the section to the “support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”
The admission from Thiessen, a Fox News contributor who served as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush, came after prominent MAGA personalities expressed shock over his Washington Post piece endorsing Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. (The president, despite his persistent lobbying for the award, lost out to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado.)
“Not only does Donald Trump deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, but there has arguably never been an American president who deserved it more,” Thiessen wrote in his Thursday column, adding that Trump has “an unprecedented peacemaking accord.”
Mark Dubowitz, the leader of the neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, responded to Posobiec’s tweet by suggesting that Thiessen was one of the few right-leaning writers at the paper. “Written by @marcthiessen who is a (welcome) outlier at the Washington Post,” Dubowitz posted.
“Thanks Mark. But not such an outlier any more! We’re now a conservative opinion page,” Thiessen promptly replied to the think tank head.
[...]
Bezos’ push for the section to focus intently on traditionally conservative and libertarian principles led to the resignation of opinion editor David Shipley, who would eventually be replaced by 33-year-old Adam O’Neal, a former correspondent for The Economist and editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal.
Since turning to O’Neal, whose only management experience was a tumultuous one-year stint at the conservative outlet The Dispatch, the Post has seen a flood of veteran columnists and editors ditch the paper in recent months. Many of them took up beleaguered publisher Will Lewis’ offer of a buyout to those who “do not feel aligned” with the paper’s new editorial direction.
In recent weeks, O’Neal has appeared to be more overt with his efforts to reshape the opinion section and make it more conservative.
Last month, longtime writer Karen Attiah – the paper’s founding Global Opinions editor who rose to prominence following the horrific murder of her columnist Jamal Khashoggi – said she was fired over “unacceptable” social media posts she made in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. Attiah also said she was the last full-time Black columnist left on the paper’s staff.
O’Neal’s most recent hires for the section include columnists from The National Review, The Spectator and The Boston Globe, who all “fit comfortably within the traditional conservative mold,” according to Status News’ Oliver Darcy. “People who have spoken to O’Neal have said he has signaled that he very much wants to recruit those on the political right to The Post,” Darcy further reported.
At the same time, O’Neal let go of at least a half-dozen staffers and a number of high-profile contractors from the opinion section last week, including editor Benjy Sarlin, media critic Jack Shafer and respected journalist Marc Fisher – who had been with the Post for roughly four decades.
Over the last year or so, The Washington Post, especially its opinion section, has veered further to the right, and that is a sad tragedy for the once-storied paper.
