A large majority of Americans say that not only should the Iran conflict end immediately, but that President Donald Trump has not reached any of his stated goals for starting the conflict in the first place.

Over three-quarters of Americans, 78%, said in a new CBS News/YouGov poll the conflict in Iran should end “now.” Only 22% said it would be better to keep fighting until Iran agrees to “give up more” concessions to the United States.

Americans also felt that Trump’s stated goals for starting the conflict had not been met. When asked if Iran had been stopped from threatening other countries, only 32% said it had. A similar proportion, 31%, think that the conflict “permanently stopped” nuclear programs in the country. Even fewer think that the conflict has led to pro-U.S. leaders taking charge—only 21%—and slightly more, 26%, think that the U.S. has brought safety and freedom to the Iranian people. Overall, 69% say the Iran conflict was “not worth the cost.”

READ MORE: MAGA Revolt Erupts as Trump’s Own Hawks Turn Against His Iran Deal

The results remained relatively steady across demographics, with the exception of Americans who identified as conservative. But even then, the conservative responses were not as much in Trump’s favor as one might expect. When asked if the Iran conflict should end now, while liberals and moderates strongly agreed, at 95% and 80% respectively, a majority of conservatives, 61%, also agreed.

A slight majority of conservatives, 53%, thought Iran’s nuclear programs had been permanently stopped. They were split on the question of whether Iran would threaten other countries—48% of conservatives said Iran would stop, while 52% said they wouldn’t. When it came to replacing Iran’s leaders with pro-U.S. ones or bringing freedom to Iranian citizens, a majority of conservatives agreed that hadn’t happened.

The survey was conducted between June 17-19, and surveyed 2,519 adults. It has a 2.4% margin of error.

While the Iranian conflict has caused new leaders to take control of the country—former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in airstrikes in February—he was replaced by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei. The younger Khamenei is widely described as being more conservative than his father, and the Atlantic Council think tank said he has ties to clerics it described as the “most ideologically extremist,” according to Axios.

Though Trump has claimed Iran’s military is “totally destroyed,” he’s also warned that the country could have a nuclear bomb “within six months.” However, the first report from the International Atomic Energy Agency since the Iran conflict started says that there has been no major change to the country’s nuclear program, according to Reuters.

Image via Reuters

The Trump White House is attacking one of its loyal media figures after she berated Vice President JD Vance over President Donald Trump’s Iran deal.

“The problem is, that it’s an absolutely disastrous deal that has brought us to our knees, weeks before our 250th birthday,” NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon said in a clip she posted to social media, which Mediaite reported.

“This is an utter humiliation of the United States, and everybody knows it,” she continued. “Everybody knows it, but especially Iran knows it. They are celebrating this. They are still calling us the enemy.”

“And while Iran celebrates this and sneers at us for totally capitulating when we had complete military superiority over them,” she said, “JD Vance is out there criticizing Israel, making up fantasies about how it is Israel’s fault, and Israel wants Iran to be a failed state. And if only Israel would lay down its arms and allow Hezbollah to keep attacking it, there would be peace in the Middle East.”

Ungar-Sargon called Vance’s remarks “disgusting,” “utterly deplorable,” and a “complete Tucker Carlsonification of the Vice President of the United States.”

She warned, “if this was a dry run for Vance 2028,” for president, “we sure learned a lot.”

On social media, Ungar-Sargon added: “VP JD Vance just brought the US to its knees with a humiliating deal weeks before our 250th birthday and he has the audacity to blame … Israel! … for the terrible situation we’re in.”

The White House’s Rapid Response team blasted Ungar-Sargon.

“The only humiliation here is Batya desperately begging for an additional brain cell because her failing TV … show is even more irrelevant than the likes of Kaitlan Collins and Fake Tapper,” the White House declared. “Only a moron of her caliber could still doubt President Trump’s leadership.”

In 2024, Ungar-Sargon wrote, “American Jews should vote for Trump because he is the candidate who stands most clearly for the things that have defined us for centuries.”

VP JD Vance just brought the US to its knees with a humiliating deal weeks before our 250th birthday and he has the audacity to blame … Israel! … for the terrible situation we’re in. We’re watching the Tucker Carlsonifcation of our Vice President in real time. pic.twitter.com/WL8BdQu6L7

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) June 18, 2026

Veteran journalist Jonathan Alter has published a fictitious yet “all-too-plausible” scenario whereby President Donald Trump attempts to overturn the results of the 2026 election — especially in the Senate — which could narrowly move to Democratic control in November. He suggests that it will take two sets of citizens: the general public and former U.S. presidents, among others, to defeat what he sees as the current president’s “slow-motion rolling coup attempt,” which he says is “already underway.”

Writing at Washington Monthly, Alter acknowledges that Democratic control of the House after the November election is likely, while control of the Senate is possible but not the “big blue wave” or “tsunami” he sees in the House.

Calling him a “chaos agent,” Alter explains that Trump’s “fear of impeachment and a Senate trial are making him desperate and more dangerous.”

“It’s easy to miss that a slow-motion rolling coup attempt is already underway, staged by Stephen Miller and, of course, Trump himself,” Alter writes. “When Trump told The New York Times early this year that he regretted not seizing voting machines in 2020, that was a clear signal that he will likely try to do so after the midterms.”

Ultimately, Alter predicts in his war-gamed scenario that democracy will prevail but not before a months-long constitutional crisis.

“The resolution of the crisis came after more than two months of efforts by President Trump to overturn the results of the midterm elections with unfounded accusations of vote fraud,” Alter writes, as if it were January 2027. “His efforts sparked mass protests, which gave him a pretext to invoke emergency powers and interfere in elections that, under the U.S. Constitution, are handled by the states.”

Alter points to several critical events when Trump telegraphed his intentions.

January 6, 2026: “You gotta win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told Republicans on the fifth anniversary of what some have called his coup attempt.

That same month: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good,” Trump told The New York Times.

Also that month, he told Reuters, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

Alter also points to two critical documents that presumably could give Trump broad emergency powers.

One, the National Presidential Security Memorandum (NPSM-7) that, Alter writes, “grants the president broad wartime powers to designate Americans as possible terrorists if the federal government considers them or their sponsors ‘anti-American,’ ‘anti-capitalist,’ ‘anti-Christian’ or ‘hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.'”

The second, Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs), “which were developed during the Eisenhower Administration as a single instructional book in case of a nuclear attack on Washington.”

Alter continues his war-gamed scenario: “With Mr. Trump now running a police state, former presidents, vice presidents, and Supreme Court justices finally came off the sidelines. On December 22, a hastily-organized Committee on Election Integrity issued an open letter in support of certification of the legitimate winners and filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the president’s use of NPSM-7 and PEAD powers—intended for nuclear war—was unconstitutional in domestic politics.”

Read the entire article here.

Image via Reuters