I have heard from a few Trump voters who say they're against the war, or think it's a bad idea, but still believe that he's overall a good president. None of the other things that Trump has done, not the corruption, not the end runs around the Constitution, not the unraveling of our international alliances, not the tariffs that have caused inflation to remain high, not his obvious connection to Epstein, not the adjudication that he was a rapist (technically guilty of sexual assault because the New York criminal code did not cover the exact method of his rape), not the fact that he is a convicted felon — none of those things turned the core Trump cult against him. Even the so-called bi-partisan House vote to force him to end the war only garnered four Republican votes.
I'm not going to delve too deeply into whether this war is a national security necessity, but how people react to the changing political landscape.
One of the hallmarks of cult behavior is that cult members' beliefs will shift as the cult leader's beliefs change. At first they might be surprised or shocked at the change. Some might even speak up and express disagreement with the leader's new stance. But sooner or later their views will align with the leader's, even if tucked away in a corner of their minds is a sliver of doubt. In the end they will still support him.
One of Trump's campaign promises was that he would not involve us in foreign wars. He falsely claimed that he was the only president in 40 years who didn't start a war. (That was half true — he did send our military on several engagements, even assassinating an Iranian general, but not a full fledged war; the inaccurate part was that several previous presidents also had not started any new wars). He even lobbied extensively for a Nobel Peace Prize and is still falsely claiming that he ended eight wars. Part of his campaign strategy was painting the Democrats as "warmongers". His supporters enthusiastically supported this position. Until Trump stopped supporting his own position.
Iran has been a problem in that part of the world for the last almost 50 years. It is a theocratic dictatorship that abuses its own people, and its proxies are a constant threat throughout the region. Our allies are nervous that a nuclear armed Iran would be an existential threat. During President Obama's second term the United States, along with Russia, China, Germany, the United Kingdom and the European Union, negotiated an agreement with Iran that they would submit to monitoring of the nuclear energy program and would continue to forswear any ambition to possess nuclear weapons. In exchange various sanctions would be lifted and frozen assets would be unfrozen. Iran appeared to be abiding by the terms. Trump cancelled the agreement during his first term with nothing to replace it. Naturally Iran no longer felt bound by the agreement.
Last year Israel was involved in a short-lived shooting war with Iran and wanted to neutralize their nuclear capacity, but did not have powerful enough bombs to destroy the underground facility. Trump sent our military to do the job, "obliterating" it, in his words. Eight months later, claiming that Iran was "weeks away" from constructing a nuclear bomb, he started a war with them.
Forget about the fact that the rationale for the war changed on an almost daily basis, or that the justifications sometimes were contradictory, or simply made no sense. Now, the Trump cultists who saw peace as the thing most desired on the international stage, who were convinced that Trump really was a "president of peace", now saw a nuclear Iran, no matter how unlikely it was, as the most important consideration, and were willing to put up with higher costs, including ballooning gas prices, in order to "be safe from the Iranian threat".
The thing that they were vehemently against because their guy was against it are now enthusiastically for it because their guy capriciously changed his mind.
My friends, that's the definition of a cult.
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