Why the right gets excited about bombing people

Over the last week, President Donald Trump has responded to Israel’s war on Iran with a familiar antagonistic tone.

Instead of pushing for calm and peace, Trump sent out a flurry of social media posts about how the Supreme Leader of Iran was an “easy target” and that “our patience is wearing thin,” along with a proclamation that “we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.”

Trump’s tone echoed the rhetoric of the late GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who was often at odds with Trump, when he “joked” in 2008 that he would “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”

Trump’s language also echoes the national debate in the years preceding the launch of the Iraq War in 2003, during which the attempt to find a peaceful solution by French and German leaders was ridiculed on the right. Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets like Fox News and the New York Post echoed this notion, referring to leaders dissenting from the war as an “Axis of Weasels.”

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/6/21/2329178/-Why-the-right-gets-excited-about-bombing-people