No, MAGA. We Haven’t Been at War with Iran for 47 Years

Every day, a new lie meant to bury Trump's Epstein baggage

Since Trump started his war of choice to distract from the fact he’s all over the Epstein files committing crimes against children, he’s been openly workshopping rotating excuses for it.

We’ve gone from, “they want a nuke,” to “they chant ‘death to America,’” to “it’s not that long of a war,” to “it’s not a war at all.”

While the excuses continually cycle, it seems “we’ve been at war with Iran for 47 years” is rising to the top of the Fox News fabrications.

Elected Republicans are running with that one, as it allows them to pretend they have the moral high ground despite having abandoned what little morality they may have ever had in order to be a member of a party with a convicted felon and lifelong con man as a standard bearer.

The irony is as thick as the orange pancake makeup.

The same people who insisted they were voting for Trump because he was a “man of peace” on a mission to root out all the pedos in the halls of power are now 100% on board with the war of choice, distracting from everything they supposedly stand for.

The fact that their standard bearer palled around with a prolific convicted pedophile for decades is treated as incidental, if it’s acknowledged at all.

A cult of dupes who couldn’t find Iran on a map if you spotted them the Strait of Hormuz, are now lecturing us on four decades of Middle East policy they learned about eleven minutes ago from a meme.

To MAGA, ignorance is the American birthright. The “do your own research” crowd only follows that motto when looking for excuses to eat horse dewormer. They have absolutely no interest in learning anything that might complicate the story their con man is selling them.

What really happened 47 years ago

So let’s break it down with some facts.

The “We’ve been at war with Iran for 47 years” falls apart the moment anyone touches the number. Counting back 47 years lands on 1979, the year of the Iranian Revolution and the embassy seizure, when militants took 66 Americans and held 52 of them for 444 days.

Jimmy Carter severed diplomatic relations on April 7, 1980, and there has been no formal diplomatic relationship ever since.

Broken relations are broken relations and sanctions are sanctions, but neither add up to a continuous war. In fact, as we speak, the U.S. has active sanctions on roughly two dozen countries and regions. If sanctions were akin to war, we’d be barrelling towards armageddon.

The coup, the Shah, and the Islamic revolution

The hostage crisis didn’t come from nowhere. It was triggered by American and European interference in the fledgling Iranian democracy — a history American schoolchildren know nothing about, but Iranians know by heart. The CIA and the State Department both openly acknowledge that the United States helped overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, restoring the Shah to power as their puppet.

The Shah’s reign of brutality and corruption ultimately triggered the Islamic Revolution. That is the openly available history the MAGA crowd skips, because if they had to admit that our own government toppled a democracy and backed a tyrant, the whole “47‑year war” slogan would start to sound a lot less like patriotic toughness and a lot more like a decades‑long failure that their Dim Leader made worse.

Treason: Just Another GOP Election Strategy

Speaking of history American schoolchildren know nothing about, the Republican record on Americans held in Iran is worse than ignorance — it’s treasonous.

While Carter was negotiating to free the American hostages, Ronald Reagan's people were trying to convince the Iranians not to release them. This is historical fact, not speculation.

In 2023, Texas Republican Ben Barnes told The New York Times that he traveled the Middle East in the summer of 1980 with Reagan backer John Connally, carrying the message that Iran should hold the hostages until after the election in exchange for some sweet, American-made weapons of war.

The Iranians kept their promises to the Reagan campaign and held on to the hostages. Carter lost reelection and the hostages were freed minutes after Reagan took the oath.

Five years later the same administration secretly sold arms to Iran as well as funneling the proceeds to the Contras in defiance of American law.

Think about that. Private citizens — Republicans — went around a sitting president and left 52 Americans in captivity to win an election. The party has not changed one inch since.

Epstein files and Trump’s war of choice

And this isn’t just historical sloppiness, it’s convenient timing. On March 5, the Justice Department released Epstein files it had improperly withheld, including an allegation that Trump sexually abused a minor in the 1980s, documents that only surfaced because reporters caught the omission.

That followed the House Oversight Committee’s publication of Epstein’s birthday book bearing Trump’s name. It’s no coincidence in the middle of that, Trump’s war of choice becomes the top story across mainstream media. The story shifts from “why is Trump’s name all over the Epstein files and why were key documents missing?” to “we’ve been at war with Iran for 47 years and Trump is bravely finishing it.”

Mainstream Media Makes it Easy on MAGA

Infuriatingly, the mainstream press makes it so easy for him. Reporters constantly thrust microphones in MAGA faces, eagerly amplifying the Trump-programmed lies, but rarely if ever ask any follow‑ups.

I’ve yet to hear a mainstream pundit inquire of Trump loyalist, “what, specifically, happened that has us at war supposedly for 47 years?”

If they did so, the excuse would collapse quicker than their challenge to explain it, but instead it travels into the next Fox News cycle.

To MAGA, ignorance is an American birthright. As long as the base is shouting about a pretend 47‑year war they just heard about, they don’t have to think about the very real decades‑long relationship between their “man of peace” and a prolific, convicted pedophile — or why anyone has to suffer for a war he invented.

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