March 8 (Reuters) - A week into a war with Iran that is already unpopular with much of the American public, President Donald Trump has offered various explanations for the bombing campaign, estimated the strikes could last weeks, cautioned there will likely be more U.S. casualties, and dismissed concerns about surging oil and gas prices.
FILE PHOTO: Airstrikes, not occupation: Where Trump voters draw red lines on Iran
While that has troubled many Americans, recent interviews with several who voted for Trump show they are largely standing by the president and his war – at least for now. Even his most ardent supporters, however, warned that a large deployment of U.S. ground troops in Iran would alarm them.
In the days since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, Reuters has spoken to eight Americans who voted for Trump in 2024, part of a group of 20 whom Reuters has interviewed monthly since February, to hear their thoughts on the rapidly escalating conflict.
All eight opposed the idea of the Trump administration sending substantial U.S. ground forces to Iran or getting involved in a protracted effort to install new leadership. But five said they fully supported the air and sea attacks as the only way to prevent Iran from stockpiling long-range and nuclear missiles. Three were less clear about why the administration started the conflict, saying they worried it was unduly damaging the U.S. economy and endangering U.S. citizens.
Their reactions to the war so far roughly reflect the results of a Reuters-Ipsos poll conducted last weekend that surveyed 1,282 U.S. adults. Nearly two-thirds of respondents who voted for Trump in 2024 said they approved of the strikes, while 9% said they disapproved and 27% said they were not sure. Overall, just one in four respondents expressed support for the U.S. attack on Iran.
If energy prices keep surging and Trump's tactics against Iran start to alienate his own followers, the conflict could erode support for Republicans as the U.S. heads into all-important midterm elections in November that will determine whether Congress stays in the party's control.
Although most of the eight voters Reuters interviewed reported that gasoline in their area had shot up between 20 and 50 cents per gallon, those who supported the strikes said they expected the higher prices to be short-lived.
Jon Webber, 45, a Walmart retail worker in Indiana, pointed to the struggle his parents had with volatile oil prices following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. "Yeah, it's gonna suck for a little bit, but it'll go back," he said.
After watching U.S. presidents invoke the threat posed by Iran for most of his life, Webber said it felt good to see Trump cripple the regime: "It should have been done a long time ago and we wouldn't have had to deal with it for this long."
Near Houston, Texas, Loretta Torres, 38, said she trusted the president had acted judiciously. "Trump was trying to get ahead of the game and trying to be proactive with the threats," she said.
But Torres, a mother of three, also said she feared the war could spin "out of control" or inspire terrorist attacks on major metropolitan areas like hers. Like all the voters Reuters interviewed, she dreaded the prospect of the U.S. becoming enmeshed in the region for years if Trump sends in ground troops.
LONG TIME COMING
The voters who supported the strikes were confident Trump had authorized them because they were necessary to thwart an imminent attack on the United States. Democrats and even prominent conservative commentators have expressed skepticism about this, citing the administration's varying explanations for the war.
Chad Hill, 50, a supervisor at a nuclear power plant near his home in northwestern Ohio, said he had been expecting some type of U.S. military action, despite U.S.-Iran negotiations that had been underway over Iran's nuclear program just days before the strikes: "Unfortunately, it seems like this was probably the only way because in the end they don't trust us and we don't trust them."
Trump might need to send a limited military detachment into the country to fully destroy Iran's missile capabilities, Hill said, but any larger ground deployment would raise red flags for him. "No nation-building, that doesn't work," he said.
The idea of U.S. boots on Iranian ground also made Gerald Dunn, 67, uneasy. "Only if they're invited" by a new Iranian government should Trump deploy ground troops, he said, and even then, "the scale should be limited."
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Like Hill, Dunn, a martial arts instructor in New York's Hudson Valley, applauded Trump for taking action where prior administrations had simply "kicked the can down the road."
Near Savannah, Georgia, insurance firm employee Amanda Taylor, 52, said that while "there's so much we don't really know," she would back any military action that made the U.S. safer.
"Our intelligence is usually right in these things so I'm going to hope and trust that [Trump acted] because of that, and not just because of his own gut feeling," she said. At the same time, Taylor added, "nobody wants a drawn-out, true war – I would hate to see that happen."
CONFUSION OVER RATIONALE
The shifting reasons Trump administration officials gave for the strikes puzzled some voters.
On Monday, Herman Sims heard Secretary of State Marco Rubio say the U.S. learned Israel was planning to attack Iran and struck first to prevent retaliation – but on Tuesday, he heard Trump claim responsibility for leading the charge based on the president's hunch that Iran would attack if the U.S. didn't.
Sims, 66, a night operations manager for a trucking company in Dallas, Texas, said the conflicting reports "didn't make any sense," but added that he supported the strikes if they were indeed necessary to protect U.S. lives. Still, he was alarmed by the spiking gas prices and by a report that an ex-Marine's arm was broken while he protested that the U.S. should not "fight for Israel" during a Senate hearing.
"I agree 100%. We should not be fighting a war for someone else," Sims said.
In Madison, Wisconsin, college student Will Brown, 20, said he was frustrated by the administration's "wishy-washy" explanations for why the U.S. attacked when it did.
"Bombing them to the extent that we have is fine, but Trump's talked about boots on the ground and troops dying, and that I simply can't approve of," he said. Trump told the New York Post on Monday that he has not ruled out sending U.S. ground troops into Iran.
Though he was glad to see Iran's leader dead and the country's nuclear capacity reduced, Brown said he could "not fathom the amount of destruction and death" a ground invasion would bring.
Don Jernigan, 75, a retiree in Virginia Beach, said Trump had not justified putting U.S. troops in harm's way.
Assuming the Iranian threat was "so imminent that our cities are in danger of being destroyed from a long distance, from the mainland of Iran, then perhaps we should be destroying people from a long distance, like the mainland of America," Jernigan said.
Though he couldn't know what kind of threat Trump saw, Jernigan added that the U.S. strikes had raised the odds of terrorist attacks against Americans.
"If we kill their brothers and their dads and their uncles over there, they're going to come over here and try to kill ours," he said.
(Reporting by Julia Harte in New York. Editing by Paul Thomasch and Claudia Parsons)