I supported the Venezuela operation and I’m on board with acquiring Greenland because they both pass the only litmus test I care about: Will it be a net benefit to the United States? Venezuela and Greenland are low risk, high reward. Big wins for our people. We gain much and lose little or nothing. Easy call, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not actually an isolationist. I’m just an America First conservative in the strictest sense of the term. Does the benefit for America outweigh the cost? It must, or it’s a bad policy. This is one of my absolute core political principles, and always has been. With this Iran thing, I don’t see how the math works in our favor. Or at least it seems highly unlikely that it will work in our favor. And so I’m against it. If that puts me at odds with the administration, and with much of the conservative commentariat, so be it. I have to stick to what I believe. People who have followed my work for a long time are not remotely surprised by my stance on this.

So he's flat out telling us that we're in a war with Iran because Israel forced our hand. This is basically the worst possible thing he could have said.

I can't take the gaslighting, guys. I really can't. Conservatives are now running around saying "Iran has been waging war on us for 47 years." Okay then why didn't any of you call for an attack on Iran at any point until now? Why didn't you make a case for Trump "ending the war, not starting it" until precisely the moment when Trump did it? You and I both know that you are latching onto a talking point you never used until 45 seconds ago. You and I both know that almost every conservative influencer in the business was opposed to war with Iran until just now. And now you're trying to use justifications that stretch back decades. It doesn't make any sense. If you changed your mind, fine. Say so. Explain why. You're allowed to change your mind. I've changed my mind about things. But don't try to rewrite history. Be honest about it. There's too much at stake to play these games.

As always I only support military action anywhere, in any context, if it directly serves the interests of American citizens. It’s troubling that the arguments we’re hearing for this war in Iran, including from Trump himself, seem to revolve primarily around “bringing freedom to the Iranian people.” As Americans, the freedom of Iranians is not our responsibility. If a single American life is lost in the service of that goal, it will be a travesty. What nobody has even come close to sufficiently explaining is how this war will first and foremost directly benefit American citizens. That is a case that needed to have been made clearly and convincingly before this move, and it wasn’t. We’re also told how this will benefit Israel, and I’m sure it will. But Israel is not America. What does it do for America? How does it help us? That needs to be explained to us. And it isn’t “panicking” or demonstrating “disloyalty” to demand those very basic answers about how American tax money, and potentially American lives, are being spent. We hear about the danger of a nuclear Iran, but that’s odd because we were told that Iran’s nuclear capabilities had already been set back decades. We hear that this war will be over quickly and easily because Iran is powerless, which I hope and pray is the case, and maybe it will be. But that’s odd, too, because if Iran is such a paper tiger then how were they a danger to us in the first place? It seems hard to argue both that Iran is an existential threat to the United States and that we can topple them in 20 minutes with no casualties or negative downstream effects. Also the political calculation really matters here. A huge majority of American oppose this. That’s just a fact. If it costs Republicans in 26 and 28, then, no matter how things work out in Iran, it will not have been worth it. A free Iran at the cost of Democrat rule here at home is a bad deal. A free Iran for an unfree America would be just about the worst trade of the century. I’m praying for our great country today.