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pete hegseth
Nearly 70% of US Voters Oppose Iran Ground Invasion as Trump Weighs Troop Surge
A majority of those polled in a new Data for Progress survey also said that the war "is not worth the risk."
Mar 19, 2026
As President Donald Trump says he's "not afraid" of a Vietnam-style invasion of Iran and is reportedly considering sending thousands more US troops to the Middle East, polling published Thursday reveals that most American voters strongly oppose boots on the ground in a war a majority believe isn't worth it.
Just over two-thirds—68%—of respondents to the Data for Progress survey said they oppose deploying US ground troops to Iran, while just 26% support such action. Among Democratic respondents, 86% were against a ground invasion, which is also opposed by 71% of Independents. Republicans were split, with 48% supporting and 48% opposing sending troops into Iran.
Slightly more than half (52%) of those polled said they agree with the statement "going to war with Iran is not worth the risk because it will cost billions of dollars and result in the deaths of civilians and more American service members," 13 of whom have been killed during a war whose globally defining moment thus far has been the massacre of around 175 children and staff at a girls' school bombed by the US.
Among Democrats, 77% of survey respondents said the war isn't worth it. Conversely, 64% of Republicans said the war on Iran is worthwhile.
NEW: A strong majority of voters (68%) would oppose the U.S. putting boots on the ground in Iran.This includes 85% of Democrats, 71% of Independents, and about half of Republicans.
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— Data for Progress (@dataforprogress.org) March 19, 2026 at 8:38 AM
The Data for Progress survey follows Wednesday's publication of a Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft poll revealing that nearly 8 in 10 people who voted for Trump in 2024—when he campaigned heavily on a "no new wars" platform—want a swift end to the war on Iran.
Nearly three weeks into the US-Israeli war that Trump said was "won" more than a week ago, Iran remains undefeated, launching missiles and drones at targets throughout the Middle East, paralyzing international shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and demonstrating continuity of government as Israel assassinates one of its leaders after another.
As the war grinds on with no clear objective or exit strategy, the Pentagon is reportedly seeking more money and more troops for the fight. Democratic senators have warned that the US is "on a path" to a land invasion of Iran. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reportedly approved the deployment of more warships and thousands of Marines to the region.
Asked Wednesday by a reporter if he is afraid of "another Vietnam"—where more than 58,000 US troops and around 50 times as many Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians were killed over two decades—Trump replied, "I'm really not afraid of anything."
The Pentagon is now reportedly asking Congress to authorize another $200 billion for a war that's already costing taxpayers around a billion dollars a day.
This, as American workers and families struggle to make ends meet as the price of gas and other consumer goods spike amid an expensive betrayal of Trump's campaign promise to "make America affordable again."
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Pete Hegseth Lambasts 'Ungrateful' Allies, Press for Response to Deeply Unpopular Iran War
Hegseth also scolded the US media for reporting negative news about the war and insisted that it wasn't a "quagmire."
Mar 19, 2026
President Donald Trump's unprovoked and unconstitutional war against Iran has led to energy prices surging across the globe while unleashing political instability across the Middle East.
However, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Thursday that the world needs to show Trump more gratitude for everything he's done.
Speaking at a press conference, Hegseth lambasted US allies who so far have not joined Trump's Iran war, which he launched early on a Saturday morning without any approval from the US Congress.
"The world, the Middle East, our ungrateful allies in Europe, even segments of our own press, should be saying one thing to President Trump: 'Thank you,'" Hegseth said. "Thank you for the courage to stop this terror state from holding the world hostage with missiles while building, or attempting to build, a nuclear bomb. Thank you for doing the work of the free world."
Hegseth: "Our ungrateful allies in Europe, even segments of our own press, should be saying one thing to President Trump -- 'Thank you. Thank you for the courage to stop this terror stage from holding the world hostage while building or attempting to build a nuclear bomb.'" pic.twitter.com/EpuPOUDd6I
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 19, 2026
US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified under oath before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee on Wednesday that Iran's nuclear weapons program had been "obliterated" by US-led airstrikes that were launched last year, and that there "has been no effort since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability" since then.
Former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent also said Iran had posed "no imminent threat" when he announced his resignation this week.
Despite those acknowledgments by high-level officials, elsewhere in the press conference, Hegseth attacked the US media for reporting negative news about the Iran war.
"The media here—not all of it, but much of it—wants you to think, just 19 days into this conflict, that we're somehow spinning toward an endless abyss or a forever war or a quagmire," claimed the one-time Fox News host. "Nothing could be further from the truth."
Hegseth: The media wants you to think that we're somehow spinning toward an endless abyss or a forever war or a quagmire. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hear it from me.
One of hundreds of thousands who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, who watched previous foolish… pic.twitter.com/qI3RpGzmy3
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 19, 2026
Hegseth then informed viewers that as "one of hundreds of thousands who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, who watched previous foolish politicians like [Presidents George W.] Bush, [Barack] Obama, and [Joe] Biden squander American credibility," he could credibly claim that "this is not those wars" because "President Trump knows better."
Hegseth also defended the Pentagon's request for $200 billion in funding for the war, telling reporters, "IT takes money to kill bad guys."
The Iran Health Ministry has estimated more than 1,200 Iranians have been killed in Israeli and US strikes since the war began in late February.
A recent analysis of opinion polls conducted by data analyst G. Elliott Morris found that the Iran war is the most unpopular military conflict launched by the US over the span of at least three decades.
“The big takeaway from these numbers is that the new war in Iran is very unpopular,” Morris explained. “Not merely negative-number-so-what unpopular, but worst-ever-support-for-war-when-it-started unpopular. With just 38% of Americans in favor, support for bombing Iran is lower than retrospective support for the war in Iraq was in 2014.”
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Mega Media, MAGA Lies
Corporate media consolidation amplifies Trump regime propaganda.
Mar 17, 2026
“The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better!”
So said war-addicted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at a Pentagon press briefing last week as he complained about news outlets—specifically CNN—not covering the death and destruction of the war on Iran with the elated positivity Hegseth feels it so clearly deserves.
It was the latest example of the Trump regime demanding not merely a pliant news media, but an entirely servile industry that functions as its propaganda arm. While this fascist worldview has been most dramatically displayed in President Donald Trump’s brazen attempts to censor and cancel late-night comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert for their anti-Trump commentaries, ruling elites in Trump’s orbit have long pursued a dangerous realignment and consolidation of media power to serve their right-wing agenda.
Hegseth’s outburst directed at CNN reflects the Trump regime’s ploy to concentrate more corporate news networks under the command of David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance and son of right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison.
The growth of the Ellison father-son empire is based on refashioning the American press—or what’s left of it—into the palm of Trump’s hand.
Last year, Trump cleared the way for Paramount’s merger with Ellison’s Skydance Media after Paramount paid a $16 million lawsuit filed by Trump against Paramount’s CBS News. Now Paramount Skydance is on the verge of acquiring an even larger legacy media giant, Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.
“One family, the right-wing Trump-aligned Ellisons, will soon control: TikTok, CBS, CNN, HBO, Discovery Channel, BET, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, DC Studios, Fandango, Miramax, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount, PlutoTV, Showtime, TBS, The CW, TNT, Warner Bros., and more,” US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warned. “This is oligarchy.”
David’s father, Larry, is a staunch Zionist and the sixth richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of more than $198 billion. He is also one of Trump’s closest allies. The growth of the Ellison father-son empire is based on refashioning the American press—or what’s left of it—into the palm of Trump’s hand.
But it isn’t merely one family’s broadcast news juggernaut that rules this age of media monopoly power.
Censorship and MAGA’s Mouthpiece
Over the weekend, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr issued new Orwellian threats against unnamed networks running “fake news” (i.e., reporting that lacks the government’s deliriously upbeat spin) on the Iran war. Carr suggested he would revoke or refuse to renew the broadcasting licenses of networks that don’t “correct course.” While the reactions against Carr’s threats were swift, Trump wholly endorsed the FCC edict on Sunday while deriding media organizations as “Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic.”
But outside of media mergers and acquisitions, a wider net of news outlets has been pulled closer into the Trump regime’s hold. This includes the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, with its newly stated commitment to “personal liberties and free markets” along with editorials that reveal its increasing fealty to Trump.
The New York Times, while seemingly less beholden to the Trump regime, continues to churn out a steady stream of poorly disguised Zionist propaganda and breathless coverage of Trump’s imperialist military interventions. The so-called newspaper of record is so steeped in the machinery of empire that screaming prejudice drips from its discriminate use of language, as demonstrated by its passive headlines on Israeli atrocities against Palestinians that obscure Israel’s role versus its matter-of-fact reporting on recent Iranian strikes targeting Israel.
CBS News, however, proves that the Ellison media empire buys more consistent right-wing editorial leadership and allegiance to Trump.
Bari Weiss, spawned from the journalistic cesspool of the Times to later found the hilariously named website The Free Press, has been catapulted to unearned heights of the Ellison empire. While she possesses no experience as a reporter, her hard-line Zionism and anti-woke politics made her a perfect editor in chief to lead CBS News aggressively to the right.
“The mega rich have always been willing to hire, promote, and fund people willing to unquestioningly run interference for their interests while making them feel like their near-pathological selfishness, hoarding of money and power, and total disregard for the public interest is somehow morally justifiable. CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss is simply another in a long line of feckless water carriers for the one percent,” Elizabeth Spiers wrote in The Nation last December.
“[Weiss] has shown she’s not merely stupendously unqualified—she’s ideologically opposed to the practice of good journalism,” Spiers added.
Since Trump led the US empire into its unprovoked war on Iran last month, Weiss’ CBS has featured an infinite lineup of pro-war commentators, leading CBS’s own staffers to describe the network’s war coverage as a “propaganda-palooza.” Of course, such propagandizing isn’t exclusive to Trump’s newfound love of foreign wars. This was made clear in December when Weiss—who doesn’t hide her cringeworthy fawning over Trump—abruptly pulled a "60 Minutes" story on the notorious El Salvadoran prison camp where the Trump regime has sent many deportees in its ruthless war on immigrants. Since Weiss’ takeover, there’s also been a decline in CBS coverage on climate change.
Breaking the Fascist Echo Chamber
Against this grim backdrop of the decaying “Fourth Estate” of American “democracy,” there remains the ever-exploding and unwieldy landscape of independent media and social platforms. Oligarchs and authoritarians like Trump have struggled to exert control over the endlessly diverse and expanding universe of information and narratives exponentially building itself on these platforms.
Not that they haven’t tried.
Right-wing elites have successfully pushed the Meta platforms of Facebook and Instagram as well as Google’s YouTube to censor pro-Palestinian content. Trump launched his own social platform, Truth Social, in reaction to perceived anti-conservative biases in Twitter’s algorithm—which is now run by Trump’s favorite Big Tech billionaire sociopath, Elon Musk, who renamed it “X” and has proudly moved the platform’s algorithmic biases decidedly to the right. And, of course, we cannot forget TikTok, whose new US owned operation is now controlled by an investor group led by none other than Larry Ellison.
Now, as Trump oversees the final stages of a decades-long merger of corporate power and the state, his regime expects media organizations to serve not just Wall Street but the White House as well.
As is true of most pernicious policies from the Trump regime, right-wing designs on big media did not begin with Trump. Corporate media has long been an industry rife with monopolization and abuse of anti-trust laws to amass market dominance, from the Disney-ABC merger in the mid-90s to the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group’s ongoing vast control over local news outlets reaching more than 40% of US households.
But alongside the Trump regime’s growing media machine, which is designed to shield it from public scrutiny, is also the inverse agenda of strengthening the regime’s ability to scrutinize the public through domestic surveillance technology. Led by Hegseth and Trump’s resident villainous creep Stephen Miller, the regime is pushing AI companies to hand over unrestricted use of their technology to spy on Americans and urging Congress to expand government surveillance powers.
If it seems that warnings about Trump’s right-wing media takeover are sensationalist or overstated, Trump himself is quite clear about it. The despot shared an infographic over the weekend illustrating how “President Trump Is Reshaping the Media,” celebrating the defunding of NPR, the departure of prominent news anchors from major networks, and mass layoffs at the Washington Post.
Corporate media consolidation has always been about serving the interests of the elite and their capitalist system of endless personal profit. Now, as Trump oversees the final stages of a decades-long merger of corporate power and the state, his regime expects media organizations to serve not just Wall Street but the White House as well.
The good news is that the public is not powerless against this slide toward state-controlled media. If viewers can pressure a corporation as powerful as Disney with the threat of canceling their subscriptions until it spurns government bullying, as in the case of Kimmel’s show, such collective action can be replicated and broadened to other forms of economic pressure by the masses. In the same way, news worker unions like The NewsGuild CWA, WGAE, and others can work to mobilize newsrooms against the fascist media coup.
The Trump regime’s right-wing media echo chamber can and must be broken through collective people power, both in the form of boycotts and by supporting independent media that answer to no politicians, no government masters, and no corporate overlords.
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