The great unifier: As soon as the dust settled in Fordow, political data firm GrayHouse got to work asking MAGA voters how they felt about Donald Trump’s Saturday strikes on Iran’s nuclear program. The results are now in—and overwhelmingly positive.
Nine in 10 Trump voters support the attack, known as Operation Midnight Hammer, according to the poll. Eighty-four percent of respondents agreed that the strikes were “limited military actions, not war,” while 82 percent called them “a smarter, more limited operation that can achieve U.S. objectives without leading to a wider war.”
Those respondents were proven right on Monday, when Iran responded to the strikes with a limited missile barrage that targeted a U.S. military base in Qatar but caused no significant damage and yielded no casualties. Iran gave “early notice” of the “very weak” attack, according to Trump, who hours later announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran that is expected to bring the war to a close.
“The poll’s findings stand in stark contrast to mainstream media coverage that warned of a ‘civil war’ and ‘split’ within the MAGA base over Trump’s support for Israel in the war as well as his decision to strike Iran’s nuclear program,” the Free Beacon‘s Collin Anderson writes. “Though prominent Republican isolationist voices like Tucker Carlson broke with Trump over the war, polls showed little daylight between the president and his supporters.”
READ MORE: What ‘Split’? 9 in 10 MAGA Voters Back Trump Strikes on Iran, Poll Shows
Paving the way: Hours before Trump announced the ceasefire—and hours after he encouraged the Iranian people to topple their hardline regime and “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN”—Israel carried out a wave of successful strikes on Tehran’s domestic power centers.
More than 50 Israeli fighter jets targeted the Iranian regime’s internal security apparatus, including the Basij headquarters, an IRGC outpost that enforces Islamic law; the Sayyed-al-Shuhada Corps, a homeland defense faction that suppresses domestic unrest; and the General Intelligence Directorate of the Internal Security forces, which disseminates propaganda. Israel also scored a direct hit on Iran’s infamous Evin prison, “dramatically blowing the doors off a penitentiary the regime has long used to torture dissidents and even hold Americans hostage,” our Adam Kredo reports.
For Andrew Ghalili, a senior policy analyst with the National Union for Democracy in Iran dissident group, Israel’s actions over the course of the war have brought Iran closer to the conditions necessary for an uprising.
“By hitting the very command centers and intelligence units that uphold the regime’s domestic stronghold,” Ghalili, said, “Israel is weakening the spine of the system that surveils, punishes, and suppresses the Iranian people.”
READ MORE: After Trump Talks of ‘Regime Change,’ Israel Carries Out Strikes Targeting Iranian Tools of Repression
Blowing up the glass ceiling: Operation Midnight Hammer saw seven B-2 bombers drop an ungodly amount of bunker-busting bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities. “That’s impressive, to be sure,” according to our Andrew Stiles, “but not nearly as impressive as the momentous victory our president delivered for the noble cause of female empowerment and inclusive equity.”
At least one of the mission’s pilots, you see, “was a woman who identifies as female. That’s important for several reasons: First and foremost, representation matters. Imagine how empowering it must have been for all the little girls out there to learn that someone that looked like them was responsible for dropping 60,000 pounds worth of American greatness onto a fortified compound maintained (for evil purposes) by one of the most toxically masculine and ruthlessly patriarchal societies on Earth.
“It remains to be seen whether Trump will be remembered as history’s greatest feminist, but he still has (at least) three and a half years left in office. In the meantime, our nation’s long-haul flight to progress advances in the dead of night, locked and loaded; the unenlightened cower under a barrage of shattered glass and big, beautiful bombs.”
READ MORE: Blowing Up Barriers: Trump Cements Legacy as Champion of Women’s Empowerment
In other news:
- Well-connected Israeli journalist Amit Segal gave this assessment of Iran’s nuclear program following Trump’s strike: “There isn’t a single centrifuge left in Iran, as far as I understand. Natanz is fully destroyed. So [are] Esfahan and Fordow, especially the site of the centrifuges.”
- Shortly after Israel’s preemptive strikes on Iran began, Israeli intelligence operatives personally phoned several senior Iranian military commanders to convey a message: flee the country or die. “We’re closer to you than your own neck vein,” one Israeli intelligence operative told an Iranian general, according to a recording. “Put this in your head.”
- The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department posted and then removed a statement mourning “the victims and families impacted” by… attacks on Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities.
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