"cutting Medicaid to pay for bombs"

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It’s been a long four and a half years since the United States formally ended combat operations in Afghanistan. So long that MAGA’s isolationist, ‘America First’ frontman Donald Trump just couldn’t resist the urge to plunge the country back into a costly and prolonged military engagement in the Middle East. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Trump’s weekend decision to kick off a war with Iran caught even some of his closest supporters by surprise. Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and other far-right influencers lambasted the surprise attack as a betrayal of everything the MAGA movement supposedly stood for. The White House hit back at the criticism by invoking a little ‘I am the state’ absolutism: MAGA is whatever Trump wants, because “MAGA is Trump.”

As the American people struggle to make sense of our return to the Persian Gulf, answers from the White House are few and far between. This week, The Truth About is diving into the inconvenient truths behind Trump’s newest war — and why you’re likely to feel the aftershocks of Operation Epic Fury even if you don’t care about foreign policy. Let’s get rolling.

— Max Burns

Wars are staggeringly expensive things; that’s why responsible leaders do their best to avoid them. Not so for Trump, who just moved two naval fleets halfway across the world despite the United States already facing a severe shortage of munitions that some generals warn could compromise the nation’s ability to respond to an unexpected national security crisis. Troops are already running short of interceptor missiles just days into the fight with Iran.

Meanwhile, American taxpayers are footing the bill at a rate of nearly $1 billion per day.Those costs are expected to skyrocket as the Pentagon invests more in defending U.S. bases in allied countries and doubles down on costly missile strikes. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has already burned through over $340 million in Tomahawk missiles, bringing the total cost of Operation Epic Fury to over $5 billion in under a week. 

Kent Smetters, the director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, predicts total costs for a sustained Iranian conflict could reach as high as $95 billion — enough to cover nearly all 22 million Americans who saw their Affordable Care Act subsidies cut at the end of last year. That’s a lot of money that could have been spent improving the lives of people across the country. Trump chose to literally blow up the cash instead.

Speaking to MS NOW anchor Chris Hayes, Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego outlined exactly how Trump’s war is picking the pockets of the Americans he promised to help. “This administration is cutting Medicaid to pay for bombs,” Gallego said. On Tuesday, the White House used the Iran conflict to demand more money for the Department of Homeland Security, despite complaining last month that the federal government didn’t have the money to offer affordable school lunches for poor kids.

The White House hasn’t even bothered to calculate the exorbitant cost of evacuating American citizens from countries that are now active combat zones, in part because they didn’t start developing an evacuation plan until after the bombs started falling in Tehran. When asked why he didn’t make an effort to evacuate Americans before the conflict started, Trump whined that the war “happened very quickly,” but that he would eventually figure something out. That’s reassuring! 

Adding Republicans’ problems is the fact that no one seems to know exactly why we went to war with Iran in the first place, including Trump’s own Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The strike was initially sold to the press as a pre-emptive effort to stop Iran from restarting their nuclear program. By the end of the day, the cause had evolved to become an imminent strike by Iran on U.S. operating bases in the region.

During a briefing to Congress on Monday, Rubio effectively gave the game away by acknowledging that the Israeli government was already planning an Iranian attack regardless of whether or not the United States joined in. Trump was effectively cajoled into committing American troops to the fight after Israeli defense officials convinced him that any attack on Israel would likely mean future attacks on U.S. positions in the region. 

This was, it turns out, no defensive war; instead, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had persuaded Trump to lend American credibility to a war of aggression that otherwise would have faced immediate international sanction. That matters. Whatever after-the-fact reasoning Trump and Rubio have come up with to justify our expanding involvement in the conflict, the reason they are struggling to explain why America is involved in this war is because there is no actual reason for America to be involved at all. We’re effectively doing a very expensive favor for a friend.

It doesn’t help matters that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is treating the deepening conflict like a video game. On Wednesday, Hegseth gloated over the sinking of an Iranian frigate in the Indian Ocean, describing the 86 Iranian sailors killed as “quiet death.” At the same time, Trump crowed that the United States has “unlimited” munitions that would allow us to fight wars “forever.” In the rush to pat themselves on the back, the six American servicemembers who died during Iranian counterattacks this week barely merited a mention.

That’s going to complicate the GOP’s effort to sell Trump’s Iran war as a necessary act of national security. The numbers are already working against them: 60% of Americans oppose U.S. involvement in Iran, making the conflict one of the most immediately unpopular military efforts in American history. The attack is so unpopular that some MAGA influencers have even taken the unprecedented step of calling for Trump’s impeachment. Republicans expected their party to rally ‘round the flag in an echo of President George W. Bush’s War on Terror. Instead, they created an absolute mess at home and abroad.

Congressional Democrats are threatening to call a vote on the War Powers Act with the aim of limiting Trump’s stay in Iran to no more than 60 days. They aren’t likely to get their vote, especially since House Speaker Mike Johnson seems to agree with Rubio’s bizarre claim that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional. At any rate, a House vote would likely fail in the face of near-unified GOP opposition.

In the administration’s view, Congress has no legal means of preventing Trump from engaging in war against anyone he chooses. That’s a terrifying new claim of unlimited executive authority from a White House that has already claimed (and been allowed to keep) more power than any previous administration. America’s engagement with Iran will end only when Trump decides it’s time to leave.

Or, you know, when we run out of missiles.