Poll after poll has found stratospheric support for the Iran war among what is often imprecisely referred to as Donald Trump’s “base”. According to YouGov, 84% of Republicans approve of the US-Israeli attack, with this figure rising to 92% for self-identified “MAGA Republicans”. Among self-reported Trump 2024 voters, reflecting the broader coalition that returned him to power, the numbers aren’t appreciably different: anywhere from 80% to 86% say they approve of the war.

This has generated a certain befuddlement in sections of the online political commentariat. Didn’t Trump run on a solid “America First” platform? Wasn’t a central feature of his whole appeal that he shunned overseas military adventurism, especially in the Middle East? Hadn’t we all been led to believe that he had given the Republican Party a decisively “non-interventionist” makeover following the George W. Bush years?

Such conceits might have been flattering for segments of the conservative intelligentsia, but have never been particularly anchored in empirical reality. As of March 2003, around 90% of Republicans consistently supported Bush’s decision to strike Iraq. Polling from this month, which consistently shows comparable levels of support for Trump’s decision to strike Iran, indicates a stark cross-generational continuity, despite the ink spilled over the past decade purporting to chronicle a seismic ideological transformation within the Right-wing electorate.

Likewise, attempts to identify some great schism in the MAGA movement are typically based on extrapolations from a handful of aberrant podcasters. The most prominent of these are Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who evince skepticism of the war even as they remain instinctually supportive of Trump. But when Carlson and Kelly hit the campaign trail in 2024, they surely must have known they were endorsing a political project predicated on steadfast deference to the whims of one man. The case always boiled down to some variation of “restore Trump to power, and let the chips fall where they may.” This was more than sufficient for the lion’s share of Republican-inclined voters, with whom Trump had already cultivated an unshakeable bond.

Voters who rationalized supporting Trump on aspirationally “anti-war” grounds could therefore studiously overlook his pledges to blow Iran to “smithereens”, or that he’d explicitly backed a joint US-Israeli military offensive to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. “We must trust Trump in this situation,” declared the late Charlie Kirk, as the President geared up to bomb Iran last June.

With this mentality, nominally “anti-war” Republican figures could wash away four years’ worth of data from when Trump first wielded power. Somehow, the 2024 candidate was no longer the same Trump who boasted that he was minutes away from bombing Iran in 2019, to exact vengeance for an unmanned American drone being shot down over the Persian Gulf.

Tulsi Gabbard, who previously decried a Trump 1.0 policy record between 2017-21 which included imposing “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran and assassinating the country’s most revered military leader, now finds herself implicated in the very same “regime change” follies. She will forever be tied to such absurdities as her proclamation shortly before the election that “a vote for Donald Trump is a vote to end wars, not start them,” just as Robert F. Kennedy Jr deserves ridicule for his declaration that Trump 2.0 would “end the warfare state”.

The likes of Gabbard and Kennedy were foregrounded in 2024 as clever cosmetic adjustments to convince young, male-skewing voters that their inchoate dreams of an “anti-establishment” revolution could be realized by voting Republican. But no one should be terribly surprised that it’s proven rather easy to persuade the broad swath of Right-leaning voters that they should be highly exercised about an “Islamic terrorist regime” armed with hypothetical nuclear weapons. Add the ample footage of pro-government Iranians chanting “Death to America”, and you have a straightforward formula to ensure near-uniform GOP support for another war in the Middle East.

There may have been a subset of sincere anti-war voters who were snookered into voting Republican in 2024. Perhaps they were led astray by an assemblage of social media personalities who gathered in 2024 to construct a fictional, funhouse-mirror version of Trump, divorced from his record and rhetoric but specifically appealing to the podcast-consumer demographic. By and large, however, simple partisanship is what increasingly dictates views of any given military conflict. Even among self-described opponents of the current war, the most commonly-cited reason for their opposition is “I do not trust Donald Trump.” Conversely, if the past 10 years of one’s political consciousness has been animated by the overriding imperative to unflappably “trust Donald Trump”, that “trust” must now naturally extend to his “little excursion” in Iran.

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Michael Tracey is a journalist in Jersey City, NJ. He can be found on Substack at Michael Tracey. 

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