America First? War in Iran threatens to split Trump’s MAGA coalition.
President Donald Trump, who has pledged to end America’s involvement in foreign wars since his first campaign a decade ago, is now engaged in the biggest military campaign of his presidency — and some of his most prominent supporters aren’t happy about it.
“There are huge divisions over what we’ve done here,” Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News host, said this week. “This feels like an open betrayal of the MAGA base,” said Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative Party. “With this Iran thing, I don’t see how the math works in our favor. … I can’t take the gaslighting, guys,” right-wing podcast host and filmmaker Matt Walsh wrote on X in a series of critical posts that prompted a 300-word response from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
The administration warning that the Iran conflict could last weeks or more creates an unusual degree of tension between President Trump and a number of MAGA commentators, many of whom were already upset by the Epstein files controversy. Frustrated Trump supporters say the president has lost touch with what his voters care about — and what “America First” actually means. As the Republican Party begins to look ahead to a post-Trump era, the Iran conflict could fracture Mr. Trump’s MAGA coalition in ways that could profoundly shape the 2026 and 2028 elections.
Why we wrote this
The Iran conflict is drawing sharp criticism from many prominent MAGA commentators, who say President Donald Trump has lost touch with what his voters actually want. As the Republican Party begins to look toward a post-Trump era, it has the potential to reshape the MAGA coalition.
“Whatever Trump’s twisted new perversion of MAGA is, it’s going to LOSE in the midterms,” former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who left Congress in January after a falling out with the president, said Wednesday on X. “We voted for America FIRST.”
To be sure, many of Mr. Trump’s supporters — including Laura Loomer, Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro — have praised the Iranian operation to their millions of supporters since the United States and Israel launched their joint attack nearly a week ago. And congressional Republicans largely support the president. On Wednesday, every Republican senator except Rand Paul voted against a war powers resolution that would have limited the president’s ability to wage war against Iran. The House rejected a similar measure on Thursday.
The president brushed off criticism from conservative influencers, telling reporter Rachael Bade that people like Tucker Carlson and Ms. Kelly don’t speak for MAGA and that his voters like “every aspect” of what he does.
“President Trump is MAGA and MAGA is President Trump,” White House press secretary Olivia Wales told the Monitor in a statement.
Polls suggest there is some truth to this. Although several early polls show that a majority of Americans oppose strikes against Iran, they also reveal that a majority of Republicans favor them. An NBC poll released Wednesday found that 9 in 10 self-identified MAGA Republicans supported the strikes.
Yet much of Mr. Trump’s success over the past decade has come from his ability to attract not only core conservatives, but also independent voters and nonmainstream Republicans, with a coalition united by a few core principles. One: a promise to focus on domestic issues and stop spending taxpayer dollars on endless wars abroad aimed at regime change.
“The movement will split if it is a protracted conflict, because many supporters will feel that the promise of ‘no new foreign wars’ has been violated,” says Brian Darling, a former lawyer for Senator Paul, Republican of Kentucky. “The midterm elections will be a referendum on the Republican Party, and if that goes badly, this conflict will be one of the issues that will be singled out.”
America first?
Mr. Trump laid out his America First agenda on the 2016 campaign trail even before securing the GOP nomination. “America First will be the major and overarching theme of my administration,” he said in an April 2016 speech, adding that U.S. goals in the Middle East should be “to promote regional stability, not radical change.” Throughout his first term, and through 2024, Mr. Trump reiterated this vision of “America First,” which would prioritize the daily struggles of Americans at home over countries far away.
Some members of his current administration have been even more blunt on this point. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who represented Hawaii in Congress as a Democrat, joined the Republican Party and supported Mr. Trump in 2024 because he “is committed to ending wars, not starting them,” she said. During her own 2020 presidential campaign, Ms. Gabbard sold T-shirts that read: “No war with Iran.”
Likewise, Vice President JD Vance praised Mr. Trump’s avoidance of foreign entanglements during his first term, when he endorsed Mr. Trump in 2023. “My entire adult life has been shaped by presidents who threw America into reckless wars,” Mr. Vance wrote in a Wall Street Journal commentary. “Not starting a war may be a low bar, but it reflects the hawkishness of Mr. Trump’s predecessors and the foreign policy establishment they slavishly followed.”
That vision appealed to Trump voters, many of whom were frustrated by declining manufacturing jobs and the rising cost of living at home, even as the United States spent billions of dollars on wars in the Middle East.
Some of Mr. Trump’s supporters are now struggling to reconcile his past statements with more recent ones — such as an article published this week by Truth Social about how “wars can be fought ‘forever.’
Controversy surrounding Israel
The backlash from MAGA influencers intensified this week after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the administration decided to strike “proactively and defensively” after learning that Israel was planning to attack Iran and that Iran would likely retaliate against the United States, making it an “imminent threat.”
“[Rubio]“He tells us categorically that we are at war with Iran because Israel forced our hand,” Mr. Walsh posted. “That’s basically the worst thing he could have said.”
“This happened because Israel wanted it to happen,” Mr. Carlson said.
Israel has become an increasingly contentious issue within the Republican Party in recent years, as conservative commentators have debated the country’s influence in American politics, with some bordering on explicit anti-Semitism and Jewish conspiracy theories. Last fall, Mr. Carlson ignited a storm by interviewing Nick Fuentes, a far-right influencer who promotes white nationalism and has praised Adolf Hitler.
Mr Fuentes, who has more than 1.2 million followers on X, is now one of the loudest voices expressing opposition to the war in Iran – and to Mr Trump. “This is a war of aggression for Israel,” he wrote.
Julia Démarée Nikhinson/AP
In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Mr. Trump denied that Israel had forced Iran’s hand, saying it could have been the other way around. But that hasn’t dampened the complaints.
“Make America Great Again was supposed to be America first — not Israel first, not any foreign country first, not any foreign people first, but the American people first and our problems,” Ms. Greene said on Ms. Kelly’s podcast. She then lamented the cost of the war to American taxpayers – some estimates put it at $1 billion a day – at a time of dwindling Social Security funds and unaffordable health insurance. “Incredible MAGA priorities,” she wrote.
Ms. Greene pointed to turnout in Texas’ primary elections this week, in which more Democrats voted than Republicans, as a precursor to what’s to come. White House deputy chief of staff James Blair noted on social media that all of the president’s endorsed candidates won Tuesday or advanced to the runoff — a reminder, he said, that “your algorithm and/or your favorite ‘influencer’ may not reflect real life.”
Yet public polling and history suggest that Republicans will face an uphill battle in November to maintain their narrow majorities in the House and Senate. The president’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections, and many of Mr. Trump’s supporters say the Iran conflict could further burden the Republican Party.
Blake Neff, producer of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” wrote on X that some of his right-wing friends texted him saying they planned to never vote again. “Midterm elections are going to be ugly,” far-right media personality Ann Vandersteel posted in response to an article about waning enthusiasm among young conservatives. “We’re going to bleed support,” predicted Steve Bannon, chief strategist during Mr. Trump’s first term, on his “War Room” podcast.
On Thursday evening, Mr. Trump shared an article on Truth Social about how “former MAGA influencers” have lost their influence.
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