Many years after he left the presidency, Lyndon Johnson lamented how Vietnam consumed his entire term.
“That bitch of a war killed the lady I really loved — the Great Society,” he reportedly said.
It did not matter that he had helped the country grieve the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and signed landmark civil rights and voting rights laws. People forgot that he created Medicare and Medicaid.
His decision to escalate the war meant that chants of “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today” echoed for generations. Martin Luther King Jr. broke with Johnson despite his civil rights accomplishments.
President Donald Trump may not realize it now, but he did the same thing with his presidency. The “One Big, Beautiful Bill”? It’s now an afterthought.
This had come after more than a week of teasing what his decision would be. As late as Friday, Trump said he would make his decision within two weeks.
Forget about his relationship with Elon Musk turning sour and DOGE. Forget Trump’s revenge tour against his perceived enemies like law firms. Forget his war on DEI and transgender people. Forget any judicial nominations he might make.
If the January 6 riot will be the defining moment of Trump’s first term in the White House, the second sentence of his obituary will be his decision to fully side with Israel on Iran to the extent of using massive U.S. military might without any apparent direct provocation.
Trump also shares a parallel with another president. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election on the slogan of, “He kept us out of war,” to highlight how he had kept the country out of World War I, only to have the United States enter the war the year afterward.
Trump preached that he would be the candidate who would not send the nation into war. Last year, Trump spent one of his final campaign stops in Warren, Mich., making an appeal to Muslim Americans who loathed Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s support for Israel amid its assault on Gaza.
“If Kamala wins, only death and destruction await because she is the candidate of endless wars,” he said. “I am the candidate of peace. I am peace. But I need every Muslim American in Michigan to get the hell out and vote.”
Muslim and Arab-American voters rewarded him handsomely by swinging to the right. Now, Trump has fully thrown his support behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long promoted the idea that Iran was just weeks away from obtaining a nuclear weapon, in a way that Biden and Harris never did.
In fact, Trump knows how wars can be a drag just by looking at what happened in Biden’s presidency beyond his support for Israel.
After a honeymoon period, Biden’s approval ratings tumbled precipitously after his exit from Afghanistan. Trump made hay out of this and even invited the families of US servicemembers who died during the exit to speak at the Republican National Convention last year in Milwaukee.
Trump’s decision to get behind Netanyahu against Iran should surprise nobody. Ten years ago this month, when he descended the golden elevator to announce his campaign for president, he excoriated Barack Obama for the nuclear agreement his administration and U.S. allies brokered with Iran, saying “He makes that deal, Israel maybe won’t exist very long. It’s a disaster, and we have to protect Israel.”
In 2018, Trump withdrew from the nuclear agreement and levied sanctions against Iran. He ordered the strike that killed top Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani. While Trump had made some overtures to Iran in his second administration, those look to be for naught now.
Despite Trump’s stated desire to be a “peace president,” he will be remembered as the president who ordered a massive U.S. strike on Iran without direct provocation. Whether it leads to war or simply a proxy battle between Iran, the U.S. and their respective allies, he has opened the door for a new chapter of American involvement in the Middle East after he had specifically excoriated the neoconservatives in his party.
Indeed, Trump need not look any further than the most recent Republican presidents elected before him — both George H.W. Bush and his son, George W. Bush have legacies defined largely by their wars against Saddam Hussein.
Where the elder Bush’s war is now remembered as a sign of his competence and mastery of foreign policy, the disaster of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 tarred the rest of his presidency. Only now, after Republicans threaten his humanitarian programs like PEPFAR, has Bush the younger undergone a rehabilitation of reputation.
The president’s decision to strike Iran will not just exist in a vacuum either. Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson both threw their support behind Trump’s decision. But they do not recognize that this will make their legislative goals harder.
While they have utterly failed in their constitutional authority to keep a president’s military authority in check, this will inevitably require some type of congressional action, even if it is simply appropriating money for the war effort, either for American troops or to support Israel and other American proxies.
That will take time off the calendar to pass their and Trump’s proposed “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” Morever, it will likely turn more of the public against the legislation because it will seem trivial compared to the need to mobilize resources to defend the United States.
This is not to say that Trump is guaranteed to be remembered as a failure, though his approval rating continues to tumble even on policies where Americans supported him like immigration.
But it does mean that Iran will define every other aspect of his presidency.
Whether Trump recognizes it, he is now married to military strikes and divorce will be much harder here than it was for his first two wives.
