Megyn Kelly: I’d still back Trump even if he dropped a nuke — Dems are worse!

Crisis averted! The U.S. and Iran have agreed to a ceasefire, allowing the Strait of Hormuz to reopen and President Trump to back down from his threat to end the Iranian civilization. That’s welcome news, because the administration was flirting with a very, very dangerous course of action — one that put it at odds with many of Trump’s most fervent supporters, for whom his no new wars promise was important. 

Of course, some have Trump’s back no matter what.  

Conservative commentator Megyn Kelly admitted that she’s Team Trump ride or die. Even if the president were to drop a nuclear bomb, she’d still vote for him! Check this out.  

As her panelist Emily Jashinsky notes, she’s effectively doubling down on Trump’s own claim that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any support. Now the comment seems extra relevant, since Trump has effectively been threatening to wipe the Iranian civilization off the map unless they give into his demands.  

And I, for one, hope they do. I hope Iran backs down and makes a deal with Trump to dismantle their nuclear program, cease funding terrorists, and reform their government into a pro-Western democracy. In other words, I hope his gambit works.  

But even if cooler heads have prevailed and we are no longer in a place where we are actively threatening to completely destroy Iran, I don’t know that we should be implicitly threatening nuclear war against anyone, least of all a country half a world a way that poses no current threat to us whatsoever. And that’s because I don’t really think the U.S. should make idle threats. 

Now maybe Trump is just embracing Richard Nixon’s madman theory, which held that we could convince our enemies to back down by giving the impression that we were crazy and willing to nuke that at the slightest provocation unless they backed down. Conservative commentator Erick Erickson thinks that’s what Trumps doing. He writes:  

“What’s actually happening here is the president has embraced the ‘mad man’ theory and is trying to convince the Iranians that he’s willing to do whatever to wipe them out in hopes of getting a deal. The failure is that the president, like so many others, doesn’t actually appreciate that the Iranians are mad men who live in a fundamentally religious world where they really do believe they are to wipe out Israel and their citizens are expendable.” 

I don’t actually believe that the Iranian leaders have an irrational desire to be killed themselves, but yes, it is true that they are perfectly willing to let their people suffer. They also might simply not believe Trump has actually gone crazy and is going to follow through with these threats, because the consequences for Americans — in terms of higher oil prices and much else — would be too catastrophic. 

Which means that this is a really questionable tactic Trump is employing.  

During World War II, when we demanded Japan’s immediate surrender and didn’t receive it, we followed up with a second nuclear bombing. We want our enemies to know that we mean business, so that they take us seriously. Which means if we don’t follow through, now that we’ve promised Iran civilization-level extinction, our more significant enemies, like China and Russia, will feel emboldened. That’s not a situation we want to be in — which means Trump should have considered that Iran is not a serious enough threat to us to merit raising the stakes this much. 

Critics of the president have always expressed exasperation with the basic fact that millions of people like and trust Trump, they respect his judgment, they’re with him. These Americans don’t always agree with Trump, but like Megyn Kelly, they believe that Democrats are universally worse and committed to making the country less prosperous and less free, and the idea of voting for them is basically a nonstarter. 

But mark my words, if this war goes on much longer, or involves greater commitment to the U.S. and more protracted and prolonged conflict and greater hardship for Americans, the voters are just not going to stand for it. They are going to punish Republicans in 2026 and again in 2028 — at which point, you will have Democrats back in charge. So any and all Trump supporters who want to avoid that outcome need to be clear that their votes are up for grabs (or at the very least, they could stay home and not vote). 

Right now, Trump isn’t just gambling that he can convince the Iranians he’s crazy enough that they need to back off. He’s gambling that he won’t lose significant support even if he goes through with the craziness. That’s the real madman theory. 

Robby Soave is co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising” and a senior editor for Reason Magazine. This column is an edited transcription of his daily commentary. 

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