President Trump’s war in Iran is barely a week old and “MAGA already hates” it, said Will Sommer in The Bulwark. This should not be surprising. From the first days of his 2016 campaign, the central pillar of Trump’s isolationist, “America first” agenda was a pledge to waste no more blood and treasure on new wars of choice and to stop trying to topple, in his own words, “foreign regimes that we know nothing about.” Now that the self-declared “President of Peace” has done precisely that in Iran, the mood within MAGA is “dour.”
Podcaster Tucker Carlson denounced the war as “absolutely disgusting and evil,” accusing Israel of having duped the administration into doing its Middle Eastern dirty work. Former House member Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Trump of “betrayal.” Other MAGA stalwarts, including former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly, commentator Matt Walsh, and misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, are also speaking out. For now, dissent is a minority position among Republicans, 77% of whom say they support the war, numbers that somewhat support Trump’s boast that “MAGA is Trump...and MAGA loves what I’m doing.” But it has only been a week, said Emma Ashford in Foreign Policy. With midterms looming and 59% of Americans already opposed to the war, Trump has no margin for error. He has “rolled the dice” and bet his presidency that this will be a “short successful war,” not
another “disastrous Middle East quagmire.”
Quagmires are off the table, said Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post. When Trump promised no new “forever wars,” he meant he wouldn’t send “U.S. boots into foreign hot spots” for multiyear “nation building” exercises such as we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran will be more like his January raid on Venezuela: a brief but overwhelming action to “decapitate” a hostile regime, involving few if any ground troops. What happens after that “will be up to the Iranian people.” Trump has not forgotten the lessons of Iraq, said Niall Ferguson in The Free Press, and there will be no attempt to build a Western-style democracy. The “one thing I can confidently promise” about war with Iran: “It will not last long.”
That’s not how wars work, said Alex Shephard in The New Republic. In a region this complex and volatile, there are countless ways the conflict could “careen out of control” and require an infusion of U.S. ground troops—something Trump says he doesn’t have the “yips” about. Yes, it would be very like Trump to simply “declare ‘victory!’” and “walk away from the carnage,” in time to mend fences with MAGA and have voters forget about Iran before the midterms. But that will be hard if regional allies are bogged down in wars with Iran and its proxies, or if a regime even more dangerous than the one we’re trying to destroy arises in Tehran.
What happens next will shape the Right for years to come, said David M. Drucker in Bloomberg. Many observers misidentify a significant chunk of the MAGA base as isolationist, when what it is really opposed to is losing. For them, bombing Tehran in a muscular show of American power is fine. Occupying it would be another matter entirely. Still, cracks in the MAGA coalition are showing—and if the war drags on and more America-first voters bail, it may “become impossible for the next Republican nominee to take the baton from Trump and win the White House.” That’s something for Trump’s most likely successors, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “to think about.”
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