How the war with Iran is already reshaping Donald Trump’s presidency

The war between the United States and the mullahs of Tehran is in its second month and it has already significantly changed the presidency of Donald Trump. As the president considers how to navigate this new dynamic, it is worth considering the experience of some previous presidents who came into office without expecting to become wartime presidents.

Woodrow Wilson ended a four-game Republican winning streak by winning the three-way election of 1912. He did so because his two opponents, former President Teddy Roosevelt and incumbent President William Howard Taft, split the Republican vote.

As president, Wilson embarked on a progressive and aggressive domestic policy agenda. Things changed when World War I broke out in Europe in the middle of Wilson’s first term. Wilson then ran for office in 1916 promising to keep America out of conflict, even using the slogan “He kept us out of war.”

He failed to keep this promise, however, when America entered the war in 1917, during the first year of his second term.

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Portrait of Woodrow Wilson during his campaign for governor of New Jersey in 1910. (Circa Images/GHI/Universal History Archives/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932 to save the economy from the Great Depression. During his third term, he was given a new mission: to fight the Axis powers and preside over the largest military mobilization in American history. Roosevelt addressed this change in a 1943 press conference, where he explained the transition from “Dr. New Deal” to “Dr. Win-the-War.” FDR’s joke underscored how his administration had to reorganize itself to meet the new challenge.

Lyndon Johnson came to power unexpectedly after the tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy. He took power in peacetime and began pursuing his dream of a Great Society – a vast national program rivaling Roosevelt’s New Deal.

While he succeeded in passing his ambitious – and expensive – national agenda, he quickly found himself and his administration consumed by the conflict in Vietnam. The experience was so exhausting that in 1968 Johnson, who had spent his entire life running for president, shocked the world by refusing to seek re-election.

In 2000, George W. Bush explicitly campaigned on a humble foreign policy, rejecting the nation-building missions of the Bill Clinton era. His ambition was to be the “president of education”.

Then, 19 Al-Qaeda jihadist militants struck America on 9/11. In response, Bush ordered the invasion of countries that support terrorism, Afghanistan and then Iraq. As someone who served in this administration, the change I saw was palpable. Bush came into office with one sort of vision for his presidency, but history had a completely different idea.

President George W. Bush, right, speaks about flooding in the Midwest that has displaced thousands during a flood briefing as Vice President Dick Cheney listens June 17, 2008 in Washington, DC. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

War doesn’t just reshape the man behind the Resolute desk. This changes the teams around the president. We saw this with the resignation of Trump’s counterterrorism director, Joe Kent. As the Kent episode showed, advisors who were lined up before the shooting began were not necessarily lined up once the fighting began.

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This sort of thing has also happened under previous presidencies. In the early years of his administration, Wilson depended on the advice of Colonel Edward House, a Texas political operative who was so close to the president that he even lived in the White House. Things changed during the war, however, when internal critics at the State Department and the White House objected to House’s broad mandate for war management. Wilson and House also clashed over the Treaty of Versailles, which permanently ended their once close relationship.

As for Johnson, he was notoriously intolerant of internal dissent and he drove out or silenced advisers who questioned his Vietnam strategy. Johnson sidelined his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara – initially the face of the Vietnam War – after Johnson noticed and did not appreciate McNamara’s growing skepticism of Johnson’s Vietnam policy. Johnson wanted – and got – an echo chamber, to his administration and to the detriment of our nation.

Daylight saving time first took effect during the Johnson administration after the passage of the Uniform Time Act of 1966. (Bettmann/Contributor via Getty Images)

In the Bush administration, the Iraq War sparked a bureaucratic civil war within Bush’s national security team. This internal struggle led to the Valerie Plame affair, which led to the indictment of Vice President Cheney’s top aide, Scooter Libby, after the name of a secret CIA agent was revealed.

Libby, however, had not divulged her name; his bureaucratic nemesis, Dick Armitage, was the leaker, and Armitage remained shamefully silent about his role during the investigation. The episode showed how the high stakes brought about by war can upend an administration, not to mention innocent lives.

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War also has personal consequences for presidents. Sometimes this leads to changes in behavior. In 2003, Bush gave up playing golf, one of his few ways to escape the pressures of the presidency. He said years later that he didn’t want to be seen on the links while American soldiers were dying in Iraq. As he explained in 2008, “I don’t want a mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf.” It was a quietly devastating admission about the weight a wartime president carries every day.

In other cases, the price of being a wartime president has been even greater. Wilson suffered a stroke while in Europe and was incapacitated for much of the remainder of the administration; his team kept the American people in the dark while his wife Edith secretly ran things at the White House. Roosevelt died during his fourth term at age 63. Those who saw him in his final days found him pale and exhausted beyond his years. A visibly slimmed-down Johnson, who left office at age 60, died less than four years after leaving the White House.

Although these examples may seem poignant, there is nevertheless an instructive counter-example.

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George HW Bush entered the Gulf War with a limited objective, built a broad international coalition to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, achieved that objective, and escaped. Bush’s national security team was extraordinarily disciplined and cohesive. The war does not appear to have fundamentally damaged Bush’s presidency or his person. Yet even Bush could not escape the political gravity of his wartime leadership: He was seen as so focused on foreign affairs that he lost touch with a domestic economy in recession, leading to what many believed highly improbable when Bush had a 91 percent approval rating on the way: his defeat to Bill Clinton in 1992.

The lesson here is not that presidents should shy away from the use of force. President Trump showed courage in taking on one of the most murderous and predatory regimes of the last half century. The decision to go to war is the most difficult decision a president can make. It costs lives and changes the world in unpredictable ways. And even before the end is reached, it changes the president, his team, and his agenda, testing his character and straining his body and soul in ways that cannot be fully anticipated.

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