WASHINGTON—By a seven-vote margin, the GOP-run U.S. House backed Donald Trump’s war on Iran, but that wasn’t the big war story out of Washington on the sixth day of the war. A Pentagon memo saying the military expects the war to continue through at least September was.
And that prospect lands the war smack into the fall election campaign.
The memo, uncovered by Politico and picked up by other news outlets, says the military’s U.S. Central Command, which is running the war by remote control, needs 100 more intelligence officers at its Tampa, Fla., headquarters to dope out what and whom to hit and how, because the war will keep going through the summer and into autumn.
That’s far longer than the maximum 60 days a president can send forces overseas before coming to Congress for an OK, according to the 1973 War Powers Act. It’s also far longer than the immediate pullout the congressional War Powers resolution demanded.
That’s the measure that lost 212-219 on the House floor on March 5, as four Democrats joined all but one Republican in voting it down. Some 214 Republicans voted for Trump’s war. All the rest of the Democrats voted against Trump’s war and for invoking the War Powers Act to force a pullout.
The day before, the GOP-run Senate also rejected a similar War Powers resolution by a 47-53 vote. All the Republicans except Rand Paul, R-Ky., voted against the resolution and for Trump’s war. And 44 Democrats and both independents voted to stop the war, while John Fetterman, D-Pa., supported Trump.
As if the potential length of the war wasn’t bad news enough for the majority of Americans who oppose the war, one informed lawmaker calculated its cost to taxpayers at $1 billion per day.
Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., a member of the House Appropriations Committee, which helps distribute federal dollars around government agencies and functions, forecast the war could cost $100 billion-$150 billion if it ran as long as the military memo predicts.
He added the Pentagon would have to come to Congress for the extra money, on top of the $1 trillion it now receives.
The war has also cost the lives of six members of the military, all from Iowa, and of more than 1,230 Iranians, says the Red Crescent, a Middle East land sector of the International Red Cross.
Among the Iranians killed by U.S. or Israeli bombs were Ayatollah Ali Khameini, Iran’s supreme ruler, three members of his family, and other top Iranian leaders—and 165 young girls crushed when a bomb hit their elementary school.
All of this is not calculated to make the Iran War, jointly launched by President Trump and his hard-right ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, popular with the voters.
Opinion polls, including those from before it was launched, showed the war on Iran is unpopular, with support as low as 27%. When CNN asked respondents if they favor sending U.S. ground troops into Iran, thumbs turned down with only 12 percent backing that idea.
The quick disapproval of the Iran War is in stark contrast to the history of public opinion about other “forever wars” which Trump railed against while on the campaign trail in 2024.
Despite the vociferous protests of the 1960s, a majority of voters did not turn against the Vietnam War until GOP President Nixon enlarged it to the Indochina War by bombing Laos and Kampuchea, then called Cambodia.
Once they did, in massive demonstrations—including one at Kent State University in Ohio, where GOP-sent National Guards shot and killed four protesting students—Nixon was forced to negotiate a peace with North Vietnam in 1973. Two years later, the North had reunified the artificially split country.
Voters also soured on the Afghanistan War when the facts on the ground proved George W. Bush, who launched it, wrong.
Trump blamed his successor and predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden, for the chaotic pullout from Afghanistan in 2021, conveniently overlooking two facts. One was that the U.S. public was tired of the 20-year war. The other was that Trump himself, the year before, had negotiated the pullout terms with the later-victorious Taliban.
The exception was Bush’s Iraq War. Like the Iran War, it split Congress right down the middle, mostly along partisan lines. Voters later turned against that war and against Bush, when his excuse for it, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s “arsenal” of nuclear weapons, turned out to be a lie.
That’s another precedent that should scare the GOP. One of the shifting excuses Trump and Netanyahu use for this war is to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Yet they launched a 12-day war last July to do so, and claimed success then.
All of this, plus an economy with rising prices for eggs, milk, and other basics, at least 15 million people being thrown off health care by Trump, and reports of Trump’s ICE agents terrorizing demonstrators nationwide—and murdering citizens—makes for a potent stew of dissatisfaction going into the November 2026 election.
Michael Waldman, director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, says Trump realizes the stew and may try to screw up the election to prevent an anti-GOP landslide in November.
“The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to decide when the nation goes to war. There’s been no deliberation, no vote, no clear justification. The attack on Iran is unconstitutional,” he wrote in a weekend column.
Trump persists in defying the Constitution. Waldman forecast he could do so again to the benefit of his fellow ultra-rich and the GOP’s corporate backers.
“As Trump’s polls plummet and his political standing grows shakier, the effort to undermine our elections has been intensifying. Now it looks like operatives and officials may try to claim national security as a rationale to mess with the vote,” Waldman wrote.
“Just hours after launching the Iran War, Trump reposted a headline on Truth Social”—his media platform—declaring, without evidence, that “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with [the] United States.”
“Governments, especially authoritarian regimes, often use crises to try to manipulate elections,” Waldman said.
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