If war with Iran becomes the issue that fractures the MAGA coalition, the historical irony would be considerable.
Iran’s central role in Republican politics is nothing new. The modern Republican coalition—forged by Ronald Reagan with the 1980 presidential election, when he defeated President Jimmy Carter—was defined by antipathy toward Iran and coincided precisely with the rise of the current regime in Tehran.
What followed were decades that shaped the political worldview of millions of Americans, including Donald Trump. Now they are in their senior years, watching to see whether the regime that took hold in that era finally collapses, and at what cost to the United States and its allies.
Ironically, the war against Iran that every president since Reagan avoided may prove to be what breaks that MAGA coalition apart—and opens the door to a Democratic resurgence.
The 1970s were a difficult decade for Americans. Vietnam’s shadow lingered long after the last troops came home. A deep skepticism toward elected officials took hold and there was little appetite for another ground war, even a limited one. The world’s most awesome military force, the very same one that had defeated global fascism in the 1940s, had failed to prevent Vietnam’s unification under communist rule, and the United States’ sense of its own place on the world stage had shifted accordingly. At home, the nation was fracturing along social and cultural lines. And stagflation—the punishing combination of high unemployment and inflation—had shattered the economic expectations that postwar prosperity had made to seem permanent.
As if all of that were not enough, an energy crisis that spiked twice, in 1973 and again in 1979, made the country feel economically hostage to far smaller and weaker governments in the Middle East, as the oil-producing cartel OPEC squeezed U.S. prices and supplies.
The modern conservative movement that gained strength during this period, a coalition of Evangelical Christians, New Right intellectuals, Wall Street and business interests, neoconservative Democrats, and traditional anti-government Republicans, laid the blame for all of it squarely on the Democratic Party. The Democrats had controlled Congress since 1955, and conservatives charged that together with Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter—as well as middle-of-the-road Republicans Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—they had driven the nation into the ground by overregulating the economy; taxing and spending without restraint; and refusing to support a strong defense against communism.
Then came the Iran hostage crisis. In January and February 1979, a revolution toppled the monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and ushered in a new era of Islamic rule under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As historian David Farber writes in Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter with Radical Islam, many high-level U.S. policymakers, so used to seeing the world through the lens of the Cold War, missed the growing strength of Islamic fundamentalism.
When Carter allowed the shah, whose repressive secret police had terrorized Iranians for decades, into the United States in October of that year to receive cancer treatment in New York, the situation exploded. On Nov. 4, a group of Iranian students broke into the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, seizing 66 Americans, including diplomats, as hostages. (The captors released women and Black hostages later in November, and another hostage who became seriously ill in July 1980.) They saw Carter’s decision as yet another example of U.S. interference in Iranian affairs. Many had learned how the CIA, under President Dwight Eisenhower, had backed the 1953 coup that overthrew Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq. Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, instantly predicted that the hostages would become a pivotal issue in the election.
The hostage crisis lasted 444 days, with 52 Americans kept in captivity, and consumed the Carter administration. The president spent much of his time trying to negotiate the hostages’ release, working through third parties and freezing Iranian assets held in U.S. banks. He abandoned the campaign trail, adopting a “Rose Garden strategy” whereby he remained visibly at work in the White House to demonstrate that he put governing above politics, and hoping that posture would be enough to defeat the primary challenge from Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy before carrying him through to the general election. He was hesitant to use military force. As he told State Department personnel: “I am not going to take any military action that would cause bloodshed or arouse the unstable captors of our hostages to attack them or to punish them. I’m going to be very moderate, very cautious.”
The media continually reminded the country of the crisis. ABC television broadcast nightly updates via The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage, which became a permanent late-night news show called Nightline in 1980, hosted by Ted Koppel. Many communities hung yellow ribbons on trees, doors, and streetlights to show their support. Cars were decorated with bumper stickers and local rallies called for retribution. The World Wrestling Federation introduced the Iron Sheik, a heel whose persona was hating the United States; he had little trouble goading live audiences into hating him.
Carter was already struggling with a battered economy when the hostage crisis started. Each night, ABC broadcast its updates and reminded viewers how long the standoff had dragged on—and his approval ratings kept sinking. With most of the negotiations taking place in secret, it looked to many Americans as if Carter was doing nothing. The hostages came to symbolize something larger: U.S. impotence and the Democratic Party’s chronic inability to project strength against its adversaries. First small oil-producing states had held the country hostage economically. Now they were holding Americans hostage literally. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, opening a second front of crisis, Carter grasped just how severely foreign policy was destroying his presidency.
Reagan, who had emerged as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, wielded the Iran crisis as a cudgel against Carter. He hammered the president’s failure to free the hostages and framed it as the inevitable result of an administration too weak to stand firm against its adversaries. This was a line of attack that Reagan had honed during his 1976 primary challenge against Ford, when he criticized the Republican establishment over detente, the policy of easing tensions with the Soviet Union through arms agreements, diplomacy, and trade. Now he had a Democrat in his crosshairs, and any lingering hesitation about going on the attack fell away. During a speech on Jan. 24, 1980, in South Carolina, Reagan said: “The Iranians bet that Mr. Carter would be weak in responding to an act of war. They were right.” He connected Iran to the Soviets in Afghanistan, saying, “I cannot doubt that our failure to act decisively at the time that this happened provided the Russians with the final encouragement to invade Afghanistan.”
Public confidence in Carter fell even further after Carter’s effort to launch a military rescue in April 1980, Operation Eagle Claw, ended in disaster, leaving eight U.S. servicemen dead and more injured.
In a campaign ad paid for by a group called Democrats for Reagan, viewers saw images of Iranians at the U.S. embassy as a narrator warned: “Ayatollah Khomeini and his men prefer a weak and manageable U.S. president, and have decided to do everything in their power to determine our election result.” The ad quoted a New York Times column by William Safire, which claimed that Iranian officials were on U.S. television urging voters to oppose Reagan. By the end of his term, the initial “rally around the flag” boost Carter had enjoyed had disappeared. By September 1980, his approval ratings had fallen to about 37 percent.
Knowing how much the issue mattered, Reagan’s advisors feared an “October surprise”—a last-minute hostage release which, according to internal polls, would hand Carter the election. It did not occur. Whether Reagan’s advisors actually contacted Iranian officials to delay the release remains historically contested; what is beyond dispute is how severely the crisis had already damaged Carter.
Donald Trump, then a real estate developer in New York, agreed. On Oct. 8, Trump told a television interviewer: “The Iranian situation is a case in point. That they hold our hostages is just absolutely and totally ridiculous. That this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking, is a horror. I honestly don’t think they’d do it with other countries.”
Shortly before the election, Carter noted in his diary, “The anniversary date of them having been captured absolutely filled the news media. Time, Newsweek and U.S. News all had front-cover stories on the hostages … Almost all the undecideds moved to Reagan.” On the morning of Election Day, Carter’s pollster, Pat Caddell, told Hamilton Jordan: “The sky has fallen in. We are getting murdered … It’s the hostage thing.”
Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in a decisive Republican victory, winning 489 Electoral College votes and more than 50 percent of the popular vote. Many factors contributed to the outcome, but most observers agreed that Iran loomed large. Even after Carter negotiated the hostages’ freedom, the Iranians delivered a final humiliation by delaying their release until Reagan’s inauguration. Reflecting in 2014, Carter told CNBC, “I think I would have been reelected easily if I had been able to rescue our hostages from the Iranians.”
The hostage crisis left a lasting impression on Trump. In 1990, Trump told Playboy: “We’re still suffering from a loss of respect that goes back to the Carter Administration, when helicopters were crashing into one another in Iran.” In a 2011 interview with Steve Forbes, he said, “People forget Iran. They had our hostages, and Jimmy Carter was the president, and it was pathetic. We’d still have those hostages there today if Jimmy Carter were still president.”
Yet many decades later, Trump has left his own conservative coalition politically exposed by launching the kind of attack Carter avoided and which Reagan never undertook. (In fact, Reagan’s administration secretly sold arms to Iran in exchange for help securing the release of hostages in Lebanon.)
Trump is learning the hard way that military action, especially if not carefully planned and coordinated with a majority of allies, is rarely simple in this volatile region; it can quickly ignite instability that ripples across the globe and draws the United States deeper into conflict. Those shocks inevitably reverberate at home—and this time, it is Republicans under Trump who may bear the political fallout.
