AS TRUMP directs military strikes on Iran, he’s also fighting online attacks at home from some of the loudest voices in his MAGA political movement.
“This is Israel’s war. This is not the United States’ war,” former Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, said Tuesday on his weekly political podcast.
“No one should have to die for a foreign country,” Megyn Kelly, another former Fox News host with a massive online following, said on her podcast Monday.
Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh beseeched fellow conservatives on Monday to stop supporting Trump’s military campaign. “I can’t take the gaslighting, guys. I really can’t,” he wrote on X.
MAGA critics of Trump’s new military conflict say they’re struggling to reconcile it with his “America First” principles and long record of criticizing costly and protracted American military interventions. The president has said operations against Iran could go on for four to five weeks, or longer.
“I think to them it feels legitimately like a betrayal on a fundamental tenet of Trumpism,” said Matthew Dallek, a professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management.
Trump has dismissed the idea that his critics could speak for the Make America Great Again movement: “MAGA is Trump,” he said in an interview with independent journalist Rachael Bade on Monday.
Online infighting is common in political movements but Dallek said the degree of open dissent among conservatives over Iran suggested it could be a “breaking point” for some of Trump’s most influential supporters.
Carlson, Kelly and Walsh together list more than 13 million subscribers between them on YouTube, with millions more on X and other platforms.
Trump claimed that he alone spoke for MAGA after Bade asked him about the rebellion in the ranks of his supporters, according to a post she published late Monday. “MAGA wants to see our country thrive and be safe. And MAGA loves what I’m doing — every aspect of it,” he said.
White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales echoed the president’s comments in a statement to The Washington Post on Tuesday. “President Trump is MAGA and MAGA is President Trump,” she wrote in an email. “With Operation Epic Fury, President Trump is putting America first, eliminating the threat to our people, and securing our Nation and world for generations to come,” she added.
Trump has made opposition to foreign military intervention a cornerstone of his political platform since he first sought the presidency.
In the 2016 Republican primary, he called the Iraq War “a big, fat mistake” as he sought to tie rival Jeb Bush to his brother George W. Bush’s unpopular legacy. Running against Democrat Kamala Harris in 2024, Trump called himself “the candidate of peace,” and said in his election night victory speech: “I’m not going to start a war.”
Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist for part of his first term in office, warned that turnaround could become a political problem for the president. He criticized the Iran operations after a guest on his “War Room” podcast over the weekend suggested the conflict could be “a hard slog.”
“I’m just going to be brutally frank,” Bannon said. “That was not pitched in the 2024 campaign. It just wasn’t. We’re going to bleed support.”
Whitney Phillips, a professor of information politics at the University of Oregon, said the president was severely testing his supporters’ loyalty.
“Trump has put these people in such an impossible position,” she said. “He’s not asking them to bend a little — he’s asking them to entirely reconfigure themselves into a new kind of balloon animal.”
Walsh, who has long urged Trump to take a hard line on immigration, transgender people and diversity policies, is among the MAGA influencers refusing to reconfigure.
He criticized the administration’s “confused” messaging on the justification for the Iran operation in an X post on Monday that drew a lengthy response from Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. Her X post listed what she called the “clear objectives” of Trump’s military campaign.
Sam Rosenfeld, a professor of political science at Colgate University, said the influencer backlash over Iran also speaks to wider problems emerging for Trump. His approval rating was 39 percent ahead of last month’s State of the Union address.
There is an “emerging sense that Trump’s centrality to right-wing politics has an endpoint in the not-so-distant future,” said Rosenfeld. “That all serves to loosen Trump’s symbolic grip on the right’s discourse.” (The Washington Post)
