Trump's war on Iran is already losing the home front

New surveys find that Americans broadly disapprove

Ben Armbruster

Mar 02, 2026

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/polls-trump-iran-war/

A series of new polls show that the American public is overwhelmingly opposed to President Trump’s war on Iran.

Nearly three days after the beginning of the joint U.S.-Israel attack, Trump and his top aides have offered a series of shifting (or baseless) justifications for the attack and have failed to articulate an end game or timeline on how long the conflict will last. While the U.S.-Israeli strikes have killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and other top government and military officials, they’ve also killed dozens of civilians, including more than 165 school children in southern Iran.

The Iranian response has begun to incur costs, with damage to U.S. military bases throughout the region and at least 6 U.S. service members killed. With the strong possibility that the war will only get worse, the American public has already had enough.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sunday found that just 27% supported the strikes, while 43% disapproved and 29% said they were unsure. More than half of Republicans polled said they supported the attack, but 42% said they would be less likely to back the war if it leads to "U.S. troops in the Middle East being killed or injured." Forty-five percent of all respondents said they would be less likely to support the war if gas and oil prices increase in the United States.

And a new CNN poll released on Monday found that 59% disapproved of Trump’s decision to start a war with Iran. Sixty percent said they don’t think Trump has a clear plan and 62% said he needs to acquire congressional approval for any further military action. (Both the House and Senate will reportedly consider the matter this week.)

Meanwhile, the Washington Post texted 1,003 Americans on Sunday and asked them what they thought of Trump’s attack on Iran. More than half (52%) said they opposed while 39 percent said they supported. Of the five options — oppose strongly, oppose somewhat, unsure, support somewhat, and support strongly — “oppose strongly” received the most support at 39%.

A plurality in the Post survey (47%) also said Trump should stop the strikes on Iran now, whereas just 25% said they should continue.

Americans’ sentiment about Trump’s attack now lines up with where they were before the war, as a series of polling from a variety of firms leading up to the U.S. attack found them to be against getting into another Middle East conflict. But these latest numbers are also quite significant, especially when compared with polling released just days after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Back then, a whopping 72% of Americans supported then-President Bush’s war on Iraq.

For his part, President Trump doesn’t seem too concerned.

“I think that the polling is very good, but I don’t care about polling,” he told the New York Post on Monday. “I have to do the right thing. I have to do the right thing. This should have been done a long time ago.”