June 20, 2025 - 1:20pm
There is no question that MAGA is deeply divided over Donald Trump’s prospective support for an escalated military conflict with Iran. There is, however, a question of whether that divide is permanent, and how significantly it will damage the President’s coalition.
Trump is now publicly disparaging his own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. He’s throwing jabs at Tucker Carlson. He’s drawing sharp rebukes from Steve Bannon and Candace Owens. His GOP allies Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz are angry. The split over Iran is very real, and the reason it exists at all is the very reason it could linger long into the future if Trump decides to authorise a strike on the Fordow nuclear site.
It is because of Trump that prominent supporters started to aggressively reconsider decades of conservative foreign policy — to the point where anti-interventionism became not just another plank in their worldviews but a load-bearing column. The President’s successful defenestration of every Republican candidate in 2016 was heavily dependent on his criticism of post-9/11 interventionism.
This resonated deeply with average Americans, some of whom were similarly moved by Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008, as expensive foreign entanglements began to feel like part of the same agenda which pushed open borders and financialisation. Opposition to adventures in the Middle East are not an optional part of “America First” for those voters, and certainly not for MAGA thought leaders such as Carlson and Bannon.
If Trump hypothetically changed nothing about his campaign in 2024 other than adopting the foreign policy of Lindsey Graham, he’d never have won the support of people like Gabbard, who is currently being sidelined by hawks in the administration. It’s no surprise that libertarians in the party including Rand Paul and Thomas Massie are urging caution, but divisions are also causing trouble at the Pentagon, where Elbridge Colby and others reportedly find themselves in disagreement with the direction being pushed by General Erik Kurilla.
This problem is not confined to Washington. Beyond the Beltway, a Economist and YouGov poll this week found that 53% of 2024 Trump voters “do not want the country to join in Israel’s strikes”.
Trump must convince his allies, already exhausted with his inability to end conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, that a strike on Fordow can be defined as “America First”. To be sure, the concept is more nebulous than many MAGA stakeholders with deeply ideological foreign policies like to admit. It’s not difficult to argue that permanently thwarting Iran’s nuclear ambitions with a limited strike which starts and ends with use of a bunker-buster is “America First” in theory. The problem is that MAGA is reasonably suspicious of the predicate intelligence reports, and reasonably suspicious of people who promise force will be limited.
Candace Owens wrote this week that “Donald Trump just completely fractured his base. And he did it for the very neocons who minted the #NeverTrump movement. Truly unbelievable.” Carlson, meanwhile, framed the debate starkly as one between “warmongers and peacemakers”. On the other side of the divide, conservative TV host Mark Levin has described the conflict as “good versus evil” and said: “you’re either a patriotic American who is going to get behind the President or you’re not.” On Fox News, he compared critics of the intervention to Marxist Islamists.
Needless to say, this is not going to end with Carlson and Levin agreeing to disagree. The two men and their respective allies were already at odds before Trump faced a decision on Iran, but the political stakes for the President now involve concretely siding with one over the other — and he can’t take that back. Unlike, say, the 2017 Syria strike or 2019 weapon sales to Ukraine, Trump won’t be able to cast this decision as a justifiable caveat to the populist definition of “America First” with those who take Carlson’s side.
It’s generally been true that the President could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and maintain the support of his loyal base. But that loyalty has always been built in no small part on their trust in his strong disdain for elite interventionism. Trump risks losing more than Carlson, Owens, and Theo Von if he can’t make a persuasive case that a strike fits his own definition of “America First”. This time, his credibility with MAGA is actually on the line.
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