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Yesterday, President Donald J. Trump was among the dignitaries who attended the dignified transfer returning the remains of the six U.S. soldiers killed in the military action against Iran to the United States for burial. At the transfer, Trump wore a white USA baseball cap for sale in his campaign store.
Recognizing that Americans would recoil from seeing Trump wear a baseball cap at a dignified transfer, the Fox News Channel declined to show how he had looked yesterday and aired old footage of Trump from his first term without the hat. Caught in their lie, the Fox News Channel admitted they had shown the wrong footage but claimed it was inadvertent. They did not, however, show the real footage from yesterday, showing Trump wearing his merch.
The producers at the Fox News Channel seemed to recognize that Trump’s USA hat at a dignified transfer looked like deliberate disrespect for those whose lives had been taken in the service of our country. They seemed to understand the gulf between the administration’s cartoonish approach to the war in Iran and the reality of war for those participating in it.
The official social media account of the White House has portrayed its military adventures in Iran as a movie, or a game, splicing images from what appear to be footage of U.S. military strikes with clips from adventure movies and video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. Undeterred by criticism, White House communications director Steven Cheung called for supporters to show their enthusiasm for one of the videos in comments below it.
Last Thursday, March 5, Trump talked to ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl about the war. “I hope you are impressed,” he said. “How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better. How do you like the performance?” Karl answered that “nobody questions the success of the military operation, the concern is what happens next.”
“Forget about next,” Trump answered. “They are decimated for a 10-year period before they could build it back.”
“We’re marching through the world,” Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) told a laughing Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel this morning. “We’re cleaning out the bad guys. We’re gonna have relationships with new people that will make us prosperous and safe. I have never seen anybody like it. This is Ronald Reagan Plus. Donald Trump is resetting the world in a way nobody could have dreamed of a year ago. He is the greatest commander in chief of all time. Our military is the best of all time. Iran is going down, and Cuba is next.”
The administration’s approach to foreign affairs appears to be the logical outcome of two generations of a peculiar U.S. cowboy individualism. Since the 1950s, right-wing ideologues in the United States have embraced a fantasy world in which a hero cuts through the red tape of laws and government bureaucracy to do what he thinks is right. That image was fed by TV westerns that rose after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to portray a world in which dominant white men delivered justice to their communities without the interference of government. By 1959, there were twenty-six westerns on TV. In one week in March 1959, eight of the top ten TV shows were westerns.
The idea of white men acting for freedom and justice on their own, unhampered by a government that served Black Americans, people of color, and women, became a guiding image for the rising right wing beginning with Arizona senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. It found a home in the Republican Party with Ronald Reagan in 1980, as supporters took a stand against a federal government they insisted was redistributing the tax dollars of hardworking Americans to undeserving minorities and women.
That cowboy individualism spread into foreign affairs as well, until by 2003, right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh could use it as shorthand to defend President George W. Bush’s military operation in Iraq. Just after the 2003 capture of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Limbaugh gushed about presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who had ignored the rules imposed by “liberals” and fixed what was wrong with the world. Limbaugh explained that Reagan was a cowboy: “He was brave, positive, and gave us hope. He wore a white hat…. Liberals hated Ronald Reagan.”
Limbaugh continued: “They also hate President Bush because he distinguishes between good and evil. He calls a spade a spade, and after 9-11 called evil ‘evil,’ without mincing any words, to the shock of the liberal establishment. That’s what cowboys do, you know…. In the old West, might did not make right. Right made might. Cowboys in white hats were always on the side of right, and that was their might. I am glad my President is a cowboy. He got his man! Cowboys do, you know.”
In Breaking the News today, James Fallows wrote that that way back in 2015, he concluded that “it had become far too easy for political leaders to strut and posture about ‘honoring the troops’—the Hegseth term ‘warfighters’ was not yet in common use—but then to commit them in half-thought-through “forever” wars, since so much of the public was so insulated from the consequences.”
But if Trump’s Iran adventure began with the strutting and posturing of a military performance, it is running hard into reality. It appears that Trump saw the strikes themselves as the culmination of his performance and did not have a plan for what would happen after them. He has said he was surprised that the conflict has included neighboring states.
Now the ships that carry about 20% of the world’s oil are not traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, and oil prices are surging. Rising oil prices are already hitting Americans at the gas pump—gasoline prices rose 14% last week—and will also hit the economy in general as jet fuel and diesel for trucks and tractors become more expensive. Trump tonight posted that high oil prices are “a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace. ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY.”
The public support for the financing of this war is different from that of past adventures. While President George W. Bush could borrow to pay the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, 2026 is a different story. The national debt has ballooned in the two decades since the Iraq war, and Republicans last summer justified their dramatic cuts to government programs, including healthcare and supplemental nutrition assistance, by insisting that it must be addressed. Now Trump is spending an estimated $1 billion a day on Operation Epic Fury, highlighting that while there was no money for programs that helped the American people, there appears to be plenty for a war of choice in the Middle East.
Since the 1980s, Republican presidents have been able to sell their military adventures with the argument that, like cowboys, they were cutting through bureaucracy and laws in order to do what was right. As Limbaugh described it, they were never looking for trouble, but when trouble came they faced it with courage. They were always on the side of right, defending good people against bad people. They had high morals and spoke the truth. They were “a beacon of integrity in the wild, wild West.”
The fantasy of those who embraced cowboy individualism was that if only they could have full sway, they would solve the world’s problems and keep Americans safe. But the conduct of the war is starting to illustrate that any claims of a moral code disappear when a leader exercises military might on a whim. According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. will not be bound by any “stupid rules of engagement” and will rain down “[d]eath and destruction from the sky all day long. This was never meant to be a fair fight,” he said, “and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them when they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
On Wednesday, March 4, a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship in international waters. The vessel was not participating in hostilities; it was off Sri Lanka returning from a naval exercise organized by India in the Bay of Bengal. In the past, the U.S. has participated in those exercises.
Andrew Roth, Cate Brown, and Hannah Ellis-Peterson of The Guardian noted that submarine attacks since World War II have been incredibly rare, as are attacks on vessels not taking part in hostilities. The ship was believed to have 180 people on board; Sri Lankan officials said they rescued 32 and recovered 87 bodies from the water. Hegseth boasted: “An American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters.”
On Thursday, Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali of Reuters reported that the U.S. appears to bear responsibility for the February 28 strike on a girls’ school in Minab, in southern Iran, in the early waves of the Israeli-U.S. attack. The strike appears to have killed 168 people or more, many of them children. Since the Reuters report, others have noted that the U.S. was operating in the area and Israel was not. The strike remains under investigation.
After Saturday’s dignified transfer, Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “I hate to do it, but it’s a part of war,” he said. “It’s a sad part of war.”
“It’s the bad part of war.”
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Notes:
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5773009-jake-tapper-donald-trump-iran-war-rhetoric/
“Westerns,” Time, March 30, 1959, p. 52.
Rush Limbaugh, “This Cowboy,” RushOnline.com.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-iran-war-bombing-girls-school-assessment/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/08/pete-hegseth-pentagon-trump-iran
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-iran-war-us-israel-attack-11606079
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/business/gasoline-prices.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/07/trump-dover-dignified-transfer-soldiers-iran/