Will a newly announced conservative antiwar “movement,” spearheaded by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Joe Kent, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie, coalesce into a successful third-party alternative to the GOP? It’s not likely. That’s mainly because the US system firmly enshrines the current party duopoly and because it’s hard to see — for now — how the movement might serve a larger national political agenda beyond opposition to foreign interventionism.

The party could, however, still do damage to the mainstream GOP by reminding its voters of the broken promises that brought it to power in 2024. Carlson & Co. can thus serve as a visible bad conscience for a supposedly populist cohort that pledged to “RESTORE PEACE IN EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST,” as the Republican National Convention put it in that year’s platform.

Fast-forward to today, and President Trump is plainly stuck in a new Persian Gulf quagmire. One into which he plunged head-first at the behest of the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Fox News talking head Mark Levin, and the former Bush speechwriter-turned-columnist Marc Thiessen. This group is precisely the old interventionist types whom MAGA was supposed to have left behind.

President Trump, along with his most slavish acolytes in Congress and at the White House, will insist of course that MAGA was invented by him and amounts to whatever he says it is. At least early in the war, they could point to overwhelming support for Operation Epic Fury among self-described MAGA Republicans. More recently, however, even that group has soured on the war. Today, only about a third of Trump’s closest supporters tell pollsters that the war has been worth the candle, down from half in May.

That’s not to mention the wider electorate, among whom the war is overwhelmingly unpopular. Or the non-MAGA portions of Trump’s 2024 coalition: among whom were many marginal supporters. These were people who were willing to support him on a conditional basis, based on the package he proposed — economic renewal, border restrictionism, and no more foreign wars. It’s among these groups — about a fifth of black men, half of Hispanic men, many young white men, and working-class Obama-to-Trump voters — that the war has done the greatest damage.

Can Carlson & Co turn the dissatisfaction of these groups into a new force in American politics? Again, it’s a long shot. But the fact that they are even floating the idea — nearly all of these members were once Trump’s closest populist allies — measures how far the war has cut MAGA loose from its original moorings.

---

Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

---