The cracks in MAGA are getting “harder to paper over,” said Megan Messerly in Politico. When Joe Kent resigned in protest as the nation’s top counterterrorism official last week, claiming President Trump had been hoodwinked into the Iran war by “Israel and its powerful American lobby,” he revealed the “deepening battle for the soul of the Republican Party.” Many mainstream conservatives condemned the former Green Beret as a conspiracy theorist and raging antisemite “who was probably better off gone.” But among the “antiwar populist right,” Kent was hailed as a true “America first” hero. Podcasters Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens—“whose average viewership rivals CNN’s prime-time lineup”—praised him for taking a stand against a conflict that they too consider to be in Israel’s interest, not America’s. And a day after Kent’s resignation, two leading MAGA-aligned intellectuals, Sohrab Ahmari and Christopher Caldwell, declared that the war had irreparably broken a movement that was supposed to end America’s forever wars. “The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base,” wrote Caldwell, “that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project.”
Forget the “right-wing iconoclasts and dissidents,” said Noah Rothman in National Review, because MAGA remains “whatever Trump says it is.” A Politico poll this week found that 81% of self- identified MAGA voters and 70% of Trump’s 2024 voters support the war in Iran, likely because they understand that Iran is “an avowed and blood-soaked enemy of the U.S.” Trump has not alienated himself from his base; “rather, critics of the war seem to be eagerly marginalizing themselves.” The president’s real problem is not with the MAGA faithful but with independents who swung for him in 2024, said Damon Linker in his Substack newsletter. Every poll shows those voters are “deeply disenchanted with the Trump administration on nearly every front,” from the economy to foreign policy. If Trump were allowed to run again in 2028, he’d struggle to overcome “the departure of those indie voters from his electoral coalition.”
That’s just one of the problems that will face Trump’s GOP successor, said Will Sommer in The Bulwark. In a few years, the Iran war could be as unpopular on the Right as the Iraq War is today, especially if American casualties climb higher and an energy shock shakes the economy. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump’s heirs apparent, will “likely be stuck on the wrong side of that debate in 2028.” But America-first true believers, such as Kent and Carlson, won’t be.
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