Why Do People Keep Claiming a President Will "start a war" to win reelection?

You see this claim coming up with President Trump repeatedly but it has been made regarding other presidents many times over.

Why?

1) Can anyone give an example of an American president who has started a war in order to advance their chances for reelection?

2) Can anyone say how a war has benefited the reelection prospects of any American president?

It certainly didn't help George H.W. Bush, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman. FDR and Wilson ran their entire reelection campaigns of 1940 and 1916 on keeping the U.S. out of war.

Yet this ridiculous claim keeps being put forward.

Why do you consider the thread "dumb" @shootER?

It's very clear that anything that gets people to rally behind the flag provides a bounce.

Why are you limiting your questions to American Presidents?

Several reasons

Because typically, presidents hardly ever lose re-election during war time. As a matter of fact, I don’t think there has been one instance where it happened.

Yes. For good reasons. But they don't start wars tp stay in office.

And one could make a strong argument that Lyndon Johnson chose not to continue with his reelection effort in 1968 because of the controversy over the Vietnam War. That could be considered a "loss in war time".

FDRs smallest victory was in 1944 which was the only one while the U.S. was in World War Two.

Such as?

All I know is 9/11 went a long way to get liberals to move past the Florida recount business we were still sore about on 9/10

Well, chickenshit centrist liberals.
The angry hippies kept the fires going.
But no one listened, because they're hippies.
Well, they were spot on about Nixon, Reagan, Bush Senior, and Clinton when it came to NAFTA.
'Bout time we started listening to the hippies.

What does that have to do with the idea that a president would start a war to win reelection? Unless you're a conspiracy monger who believes that the Bush Admin. pulled off the 9-11 attacks or allowed them to happen. Surely you are not one of those.

Shouldn’t you be out looking for employment?

In effect, he did start a war, a trade war with China. His constituents can rest easier, knowing, their hero, showed them who the boss is.

I got to take a picture of me in Saddam's spider hole before they bulldozed it. I also had a picture of me taking a shit in the toilet of one of Saddam's bombed out palaces in Tikrit. It had been J-Damed to hell and there was no running water but I dropped that log with pride.

From what I’m hearing, a lot of people don’t like the tariffs.

Only one, really. @Dayton3 only cares about Americans. As far as he's concerned, everyone else is expendable.

George H.W. Bush's approval rating in January 1991 was 59 percent.

On January 17, Operation Desert Storm began.

In February 1991, Bush's approval rating was 89 percent.

He may not have started the war to win re-election, and subsequent developments, namely the high unemployment rate in 1992, brought his popularity down well before the election. But there are numerous indisputable examples of international conflict leading to a spike in the president's approval ratings.

I'd prefer if we traded B-52 bombing missions and cruise missiles with China rather than tariffs and boring talk. Maybe the Lord misinterpreted my prayer asking for that.

Or maybe the Lord can spot duals?

Cool! I have (somewhere in my house or maybe online) a picture of us in 2003 dragging a tiny wooden storage shed out to our "end of runway" control tower area to use as an outhouse. One of the guys had spray painted SADAM'S PALACE on the side of it.

The irony here is that Fantasy President Kitchens would be the most likely to start a war generally, and definitely to bolster his reelection chances.