Don't expect Trump's anti-war supporters to abandon him on Venezuela

Yet another event that will just reinforce our partisan beliefs

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In the coverage of the US military’s attack on Venezuela and abduction and indictment of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, one theme that’s come up numerous times is that this could cost Trump support from his voter base. Here’s why that’s not likely to happen.

It is true that Trump has run for president repeatedly by describing his opposition several previous US military ventures. His open criticism of the Iraq War in 2015 stood him apart from most Republican politicians and presidential candidates. Such comments have led many political observers to mistakenly believe Trump is a pacifist. Or, as Maureen Dowd famously put it in 2016, “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk.”

As I noted here, Trump has never been a pacifist. (His anti-war plan for Iraq was to “take the oil.”) He would more accurately be described as an isolationist, unwilling to commit the US to defending its allies abroad. But that also seems an inadequate description of his second term in office, in which he has advocated for or threatened a US takeover of Gaza, an invasion of Greenland, a hostile incorporation of Canada, and more. This may have irked some of Trump’s more isolationist supporters, but it’s hard to find evidence that they have bolted from him as a result.

More generally, we know from a wide range of studies that voters’ policy beliefs, even when they’re pretty consistently held, tend to follow rather than precede their choice of candidate. That is, people tend to pick a favorite candidate and then adopt the views of that candidate on a wide range of issues. That’s certainly not true of every issue, but on a matter of complicated foreign policy and military affairs, people’s views are quite malleable. This is why we saw public opinion about airstrikes on Iran polarize last June; once Trump had authorized them, Republicans decided it was a better idea, while Democrats decided it was a worse one.

We should expect to see more of the same in the days to come. Many Democratic officeholders are coming out with criticisms of the Venezuela attack, while many Republicans are issuing statements of support (with the notable exceptions of apostates like Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene). Democratic voters will likely interpret this series of events as an illegal attack on a sovereign nation and an unconstitutional breach of military powers; Republican voters will see it as a necessary step to get illegal drugs under control and restore legitimate leadership to the Venezuelan government. Independents will likely be split.

Trump’s approval rating on foreign policy, while down since his inauguration, has been largely stable for the past six months. It’s unlikely to budge now.