March 3 2026 - 6:30pm
For years, the conventional wisdom was that as long as Donald Trump was in the Oval Office, conservative media would follow him into the gates of Hell — or, as it turns out, into the skies over Tehran. But as the first missiles touched down in Iran at the weekend under “Operation Epic Fury”, a funny thing happened. While Fox News and company held the line on supporting the war, some of the key figures from the digital vanguard which helped burnish the Trumpian brand are in open revolt, including Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Mike Cernovich.
Leading the charge is the Daily Wire’s resident moralist, Matt Walsh. “I can’t take the gaslighting, guys. I really can’t,” he wrote in a widely-shared post on X. “You and I both know that almost every conservative influencer in the business was opposed to war with Iran until just now. And now you’re trying to use justifications that stretch back decades. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Even the White House noticed. After Walsh followed up with a complaint about how the Trump administration’s messaging on the war was “to put it mildly, confused,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went into a defensive crouch. She responded with a laundry list of justifications, saying that Trump “is correcting decades of cowardice and holding those responsible for the deaths of Americans accountable.” Then, in a separate interview, Trump dismissed Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson as representative of MAGA. “I think that MAGA is Trump — MAGA’s not the other two,” he said.
This is a nightmare scenario for the Trump 2.0 coalition. Already, Reuters/Ipsos finds that only 27% approve of US strikes (43% disapprove, while 29% are unsure). Independents disapprove 44% to 19%, with 35% unsure — unusually soft support from the public for a major military campaign. These weak numbers reveal that the tensions over “Operation Epic Fury” are not just elite disagreements, but instead reflect a broader fracturing of the MAGA base itself.
The rift over Iran suggests that the MAGA movement is less a monolithic personality cult than a volatile ideological coalition which may have found its breaking point. For years, the glue holding the New Right together was a shared hatred of woke libs and the Washington consensus — a nebulous entity usually defined by the establishment Democrats, the Cheneys, the Romneys, and the permanent bureaucracy. By adopting the foreign policy of the very people he rose to power by mocking, Trump has effectively decapitated his own “outsider” status.
Conservatives under the age of 50 who receive their news from digital influencers tend to use the term “neocon” as a slur. They’re the ones who took MAGA’s claim seriously that America First meant no new wars in the Middle East and who are having trouble swallowing the administration’s justification, which sounds like a lazy ChatGPT version of George W. Bush’s arguments for invading Iraq more than two decades ago. If Trump loses the influencers, he risks losing the youth, as it would signal that the MAGA brand has become synonymous with 2003-style interventionism. The movement’s younger members and populist core would likely walk away, no longer willing to trade “America First” for “Israel First” or a “Bush-era forever war, but with better memes”.
This raises the existential question of succession: who inherits the crown once the golden elevator stops running? With the influencer class in open revolt, the true MAGA heir likely won’t be a dynastic choice like Don Jr nor a traditional politician like JD Vance, who now finds himself the trigger man in an administration launching missiles. What’s most likely is that the movement will likely fracture into warring fiefdoms: the neo-nationalists, the Israel hawks, the libertarian restraint crowd, and the grievance-driven culture warriors, each claiming to be the rightful heir to “America First” until the possibility of a Democratic president in 2028 brings the gang back together.
And if senior figures at the White House don’t realize that soon, they’ll find themselves shouting into a Fox News void that no one under 45 is watching.
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