Sargent: So the Times looked at 10 wars going back to World War II and found that initial support for Trump’s war is lower than at the outset of any other conflict. The Times put support for the Iran war at 41 percent. Other averages of polls have it even lower, at 38 percent. Paul, the key here is that there’s no reflexive support for the commander in chief. In fact, I wonder if it’s the opposite—people are predisposed to see Trump’s case for war as, you know, made up. Which it is. What do you think?
Waldman: Yeah, I think we have this perception that there is what we often call the rally-round-the-flag effect. Whenever there’s a war, the public rallies around the flag and wants to defend the country and comes to the president’s side. And the truth is that that’s not necessarily true—it really is contingent on a lot of things. It has certainly happened on many occasions in the past. But if you look back at events like even the beginning of the Vietnam War—you don’t even have to go back to World War II or to Korea—or if you look at the Gulf War, the first Gulf War with George H.W. Bush, which was very popular, or Afghanistan, or even Iraq in 2003, what you see is that in all of those cases, they were very different from this one.
First of all, the presidents at those times were very popular to begin with. So you had a popular president who was coming in and trying to make this case for war. The second, and I think most important thing, is that in every one of those cases, there was a real argument being made that America was under threat. And in some cases it may have been exaggerated, but at least it was plausible.
