Do you remember over the course of the 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential elections when Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” movement promised to launch the United States into yet another Middle Eastern war, this time with Iran?
No?
No one does. Because it didn’t happen.
“When I’m back in the White House, we will expel the warmongers, the profiteers, and take over our government and we will restore world peace,” Trump said during a National Guard Association speech in August 2024 to cheers and applause.
Trump’s future Director of National Intelligence, former congresswoman, veteran and key figure in the 2024 MAGA coalition, Tulsi Gabbard, also said at the same rally:
“So I mean what I say when I share with you that I know that President Trump understands the grave responsibility that a president and Commander in Chief bears for every single one of our lives…We saw this through his first term in the presidency when he not only didn’t start any new wars, he took action to de-escalate and prevent wars…”
“This is one of the main reasons why I’m committed to doing all that I can to send President Trump back to the White House,” Gabbard said. “Because I am confident that his first task will be to do the work, to walk us back from the brink of war.”
If I listed all the antiwar language used by Trump and and his ancillaries in all three of his campaigns, this would become a book instead of a column. This small snippet will suffice.
Yet at present, President Trump finds himself embroiled in complete chaos in the Middle East with an open-ended war with Iran, a conflict that had been the top wish list item for every warmonger and profiteer in Washington long before the president even thought about getting into politics.
Trump didn’t “take over” or “restore” anything. Instead, he’s now trying to out-George W. Bush, George W. Bush.
Former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen thinks this is great.
When it was reported last week that Gabbard, who resigned for personal reasons in June, had warned the president about the many potential negative outcomes of war with Iran—with almost all coming to fruition—Thiessen tweeted:
This was the most courageous decision an American president made in my lifetime, and it is all the more courageous for the fact he made it while so many around him were discouraging him. He did it anyway. That’s true greatness in action. https://t.co/a5TqtzbSLR
— Marc Thiessen (@marcthiessen) August 25, 2026
Unrepentant Bush-Cheney fanboy Thiessen has a long record of insisting that the coalition Trump built was in reality always just the neoconservative agenda, with the Iran war its grandest achievement. Fellow neocon cheerleader and Fox News’ host Mark Levin says that Trump “will go down in our history as one of the greatest presidents ever” for starting the Iran war. Both Marks, along with Daily Wire neocon Ben Shapiro and others, would like you to believe that MAGA has merely always been what they believe all along.
Why is it so important to neoconservatives to cast Trump’s agenda as their own? After all, most of them were Never Trumpers.
It’s because they understand that Trump is still the greatest center of gravity in the Republican Party. If the neocons once loathed Trump because he was turning regular Republican voters against their war projects and something closer to Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul, they can now love him for being more like themselves on the same front.
And they certainly have no shame in rewriting history to reinforce this.
This has been especially true of this new narrative that the United States has been at war with Iran for forty-seven years, since the U.S.-Iran hostage crisis of 1979. But now only Trump has been president enough to end this almost half century war!
Not only is this completely made up—Team Trump really did launch a brand new war of aggression against Iran no matter how they spin it—but if it were true, President Ronald Reagan was in fact a traitor!
After all, Reagan sold weapons to Iran in the 1980s precisely when today’s neocons insist the United States and Iran were already in an active war.
But no one thought the Reagan administration committed treason at the time because despite major tensions, no one thought America was at war with Iran.
Neocons are just making this up as they go along, as they do. Often to great effect.
If just a year-and-a-half ago Trump was declaring the “neocon era” over, now that he is giving that god forsaken ideology new life, the god forsaken are running with it.
Compact’s Sohrab Ahmari observed on Friday:
Imagine choosing to create a global supply shock after the pandemic-rebound inflation had been tamed.
Sorry, but the GOP is too reckless, and I can’t take the gaslighting from neocons-rebranded-as-MAGAs telling us that a war with Iran was exactly what the Trump coalition wanted.
— Sohrab Ahmari 🇺🇸 (@SohrabAhmari) August 28, 2026
That was never what Trump’s original coalition wanted, and it’s the reason the president’s most hardcore support is plummeting.
Maybe Marc Thiessen and Mark Levin will tell the president that instead his poll numbers are wonderful, he’s winning in Iran, and that MAGA is healthier than ever.
We already know Donald Trump believes them.
