If you want to remember why you subscribe to this newsletter (or if you don’t, why you should), hark back to what I wrote in November 2024. That was when then-President-Elect Trump — still being billed elsewhere as the peace candidate — announced his nomination of Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense:

Don’t let anyone tell you this was hard to see coming.

Americans don’t necessarily love overseas wars, but it isn’t hard to convince large majorities to back one, especially once the shooting has begun.¹ So it’s somewhat surprising that so many people in this country watched the first days of Donald Trump’s war in Iran and thought, “not for me.” An average of major polls by G. Elliott Morris showed that far more Americans oppose the bombing of Iran than support it. This opposition includes nearly a third of Republicans — an incredible fact for anyone who remembers the nearly unanimous support Republicans expressed back in 2003 once the Iraq invasion was underway. The opposition grows even larger when you add the prospect of sending ground troops into the mix.

But while this is mildly encouraging news for anyone who opposes this stupid war or the (equally stupid) Trump presidency in general, there’s a dark side to the backlash that bears noting. If you’ve spent any time actually listening to people spell out their opposition to the war, especially on social media, you’ll notice that many keep coming back to a singular villain: Israel.

Some drawing that line are listening to paleoconservative-style isolationists like Tucker Carlson, and, more subtly, Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby — a longtime foe of Israeli hawks who tried distancing the administration from the politically more problematic aspects of the war by calling the assassinations of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior regime leaders ”Israeli operations” in a recent Senate hearing. (In fact, it was openly a joint operation of the Israeli military and the CIA.) Others go for the harder stuff, like Nazi-admiring Nick Fuentes, who recently told his listeners that Trump should walk away from the war, because “Iran is fighting for all the goyim.”

While less strident in their language, the perception that the U.S. is fighting Israel’s war seems to be even more firmly entrenched on the left. A new survey out today from Data For Progress, cosponsored by Zeteo and Drop Site, found approval for the war underwater at 42%-55% — roughly in line with the average. Nearly half of those respondents — 46% — also agreed with the statement that “President Trump is more responsive to the interests of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than the interests of the American people,” compared to just a slightly higher 47% who disagreed. This was especially pronounced among Democrats — 75% of whom agreed with the statement. A smaller majority of Democrats, 59%, also told the pollsters that the Trump administration was pursuing the war “primarily for Israeli interests.” (That is compared with 43% of independents and 22% of Republicans who answered the same.)

There is a logic to this. The U.S. and Israel are the co-belligerents who started the war in the early morning hours of February 28. An early official line settled on by the Trump administration, voiced particularly by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was effectively Israel made us do it.

But that excuse was too cute by half: Netanyahu has indeed been publicly gunning for a joint war against the Islamic Republic for decades. But the U.S., as the incomparably larger military and economic power, holds the whip hand in the “special relationship” — as evidenced, if nothing else, by the fact that no U.S. president was dumb enough to follow him into one until now. Trump gave the order to launch the attack. And while Washington and Tel Aviv are bombing side by side, perceptive analysts continue to note that their reasons for getting into the war and the strategic goals they want from it are not the same.

It isn’t hard for a student of history to see what’s happening here. Given a panoply of reasons to oppose the war — the enormous cost in both taxpayer money and human lives, the economic chaos, Trump’s utter lack of a coherent goal or exit strategy, the tremendous risk of blowback and uncontrollable escalation — people keep circling back to the one that shifts blame to an Other. And not just any Other, but one who billions of people have been raised to believe a priori has the unassailable power to bend even the world’s most powerful empire to their bidding.

If the war drags on, and opposition to it grows (as opposition to wars tends to do), I’d expect to see more Republicans who voted for this administration turning to their far-right ideologues and reaching for the same excuses.