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By Hugh Cameron
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President Donald Trump, in substance as much as style, has long been viewed as a rupture in the Republican presidential lineage.
Until recently, the brash persona and policies—both domestic and foreign—that seemed to conflict with GOP norms set the president apart from his party predecessors. But with prevalent economic unease, a costly conflict in the Middle East and approval ratings now in the 30s, the contours of his second term appear to be resembling a presidency from which he once cast himself as a departure: that of George W. Bush.
"Well into his presidency, Bush was also on a downward spiral in approval ratings," said Bill Minutaglio, author of the biography First Son: George W. Bush & The Bush Family Dynasty. "Just like today, the stock market was unhappy."
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"And, just like this year, there was rocketing skepticism about whether a Middle Eastern nation really posed an imminent threat to the world order."
The Anti-War Outsider Becomes a Wartime President
Trump’s political ascendance was driven in part by his firm disavowal of America’s foreign entanglements. This struck a contrast with his rival Hillary Clinton in 2016, given the former secretary of state’s initial commitment to the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions, as well as regime change in Libya and Syria. His second and third campaigns followed a similar playbook, with Trump and his supporters relying upon a track record of starting "no new wars," despite having expanded and intensified military action across several countries during his first term.
While Trump 2.0 had already demonstrated an appetite for foreign interventions through the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, experts told Newsweek that any new parallels between the president and Bush center on the new conflict in Iran, which began on February 28 with the U.S.-Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The administration has sought to downplay any emerging comparisons between Bush’s defining foreign engagement, Iraq, and its actions in Iran.
"It’s not a regime-change war in the conventional, George W. Bush context of hundreds of thousands of troops," Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told CBS News’ 60 Minutes in early March, arguing that the current administration has no similar ideological ambitions about "a remaking of the Iranian society" and creating a "Jeffersonian democracy" in the Middle East.
But by surging troops to the region and signaling a desire to choose Iran’s postwar leadership, some see Trump’s early handling of the conflict as falling into the same "escalation trap" that ensnared Bush following Saddam Hussein’s ouster.
"Donald Trump is perhaps the only figure who could have harnessed public anger over Bush’s wars and yet revived the long-dormant dream of Bush-era hawks—to attack the Iranian regime," said historian Stephen Wertheim, senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"For the conservatives I know who favor a more restrained foreign policy, Trump’s foreign policy has jumped the shark. It is now an irrecoverable failure," he told Newsweek. "The question is how bad it will get. With the president looking likely to send in ground troops, the answer looks to be: Very bad."
Despite Trump repeatedly insisting he will not send ground troops into Iran, recent reporting has pointed to preparations that could give the U.S. that option if he chose to escalate. Administration officials and Republican lawmakers have argued the buildup is about maintaining leverage and flexibility rather than signaling an imminent incursion, with the White House emphasizing that planning for ground options does not mean a decision to deploy troops has been made.
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Is Iran Iraq 2.0?
The historians, strategists and political experts who spoke with Newsweek noted that this parallel can only go so far because of the unique nature of both engagements as well as the domestic backdrop.
Driven by pro-war sentiment following the 9/11 attacks, Bush enjoyed early support for the war in Iraq which only waned in later years. By March 2006—nearly three years after Bush's famous "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln—rising costs and casualties had turned the Iraq intervention from a popular move into one which most Americans told pollsters was a futile and morally unjustified endeavor.
But according to polling averages from Silver Bulletin, support for the Iran intervention has held at roughly 40 percent since the outset.
Matthew Baum, professor of global communications and public policy at Harvard, told Newsweek that Bush had also "engaged in far more and more extensive efforts to bring the public along with them ahead of the Iraq invasion, relative to the Trump administration with respect to Iran."
"Should the Iran war extend significantly longer, the implication is that the public may quickly sour on Iran even further than it already has," he told Newsweek.
Political strategist Matt Klink also noted the geopolitical distinctions, namely that Iraq was a "contained regime with limited asymmetric reach," while Iran is a "regional power with proxy networks, missile capabilities, and direct influence across the Middle East."
Politically, Bush sought and secured pre-clearance from Congress—while Trump has been coy about calling the Iran situation a "war" precisely to avoid triggering this requirement.
And Wertheim argues that Trump, unlike Bush, "doesn’t much care whether he brings freedom and democracy to the countries he targets," giving him "some flexibility to stop fighting even if the Iranian regime remains intact."
Rhyming, Not Repeating
However, despite the evident distinctions, both Iran and Iraq are similar in that neither was isolated from the contemporary political landscape, instead unfolding against a host of other challenges that compounded their impacts on the respective presidencies.
Brittany Martinez, Republican strategist and executive director of the conservative advocacy group Principles First, said Trump has not yet had the defining "Katrina moment" that Bush suffered—referring to the criticism following his inefficient response to the 2005 hurricane, which became shorthand for crises which permanently damage a presidency.
However, she told Newsweek that the Epstein files and current cost-of-living challenges had created "real fractures" that in the past would have forced a "course correction" by an incumbent president.
The recent release of documents related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, some of which mention the president without alleging wrongdoing, has heaped political pressure on the White House.
And with rising oil prices and pump costs compounding ongoing affordability concerns, the war has raised near-term inflation expectations as well as fears about the U.S. economy approaching a recession.
"The costs of this war, not yet in terms of American casualties but in regard to pocketbook issues is quite severe and likely to be politically costly in the short run," said Bert Rockman, professor emeritus of political science at Purdue University.
And while Minutaglio, the Bush biographer, said Democratic strategists tell him they are still waiting for Trump’s own "Katrina moment," the fallout from Iran compounding with already evident domestic issues means "the risks are pretty damned frightening for the GOP."
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How Trump Could Chart His Own Course
Trump’s second term is unfolding in a political setting so distinct from Bush’s that comparisons on policy—and their potential consequences—may fail to extend beyond the surface-level, due in no small part to him successfully remaking the Republican Party in his image.
"In Trump’s first term, he was an insurgent who was running against traditional conservatism," explains Tevi Troy, a presidential historian who held several senior roles within the Bush administration. "In his second term, he has now had the Republican nomination three straight times, something no one else has ever done, and so his brand of conservatism is most closely identified with the party."
"The current Republican Party is not a traditional conservative party," added Rockman. "It has largely evolved (or devolved) into a Trumplican Party."
And while the Iran war has ostracized some of the figures that came to be associated with Trump’s new brand of Republicanism, a recent CBS News poll found that 92 percent of MAGA Republicans continue to support military action against Iran.
Republican strategist Matt Klink believes Trump is also navigating a "far more fractured media and political environment than George W. Bush ever faced," and that the fast pace of his time in office—" constant engagement and rapid decision-making"—could prevent any single event or policy from defining or derailing his presidency.
"What looks like a similar trajectory is really a fundamentally different battlefield," he told Newsweek.
Presidencies evolve and alter—Bush himself campaigned against so-called "nation-building exercises" ahead of his 2000 election—and observers believe how close Trump’s second term mirrors his predecessor’s may depend on his own actions.
But talk of negotiations with Tehran have so far yielded no results, and other remarks from Trump suggest his own appetite for foreign intervention may not yet be satisfied.
"Cuba's next, by the way," Trump said at a recent summit. "But pretend I didn't say that, please.
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