The MAGA Civil War Is Just Getting Started
Greene, Carlson, Owens and Jones – all in slightly different ways – have channeled many of the new aspects of Trump’s politics: populism, conspiracy theories and a deep distrust of political, economic and cultural elites. They advanced Trump’s agenda while filling in its gaps and fleshing it out — part of a broader right-wing effort to translate his disjointed, discursive speeches and disjointed tweets into a coherent populist movement. But during his second term, Trump has all but abandoned the idea that his movement has any intellectual basis or, for that matter, any coherence: MAGA simply means whatever he says, even if it directly contradicts past promises. In March, responding to early critics of the Iran war who rightly called it a betrayal of his anti-interventionist promises, Trump responded with three words: “MAGA is Trump.”
Nowhere is this more evident than in war, where a president who promised to end stupid and costly foreign interventions gets bogged down in a war. Carlson went so far as to urge the U.S. military to disobey orders that could kill Iranian civilians: “Now is the time to say ‘no, absolutely not,’ and tell the president directly, ‘no,'” he said in a recent episode of his podcast, where he called Trump’s threats against the Iranians “bad.” Greene used the same word and went even further, tweeting: “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has been dropped on America. We can’t kill an entire civilization.” (The Twenty-Fifth Amendment allows for the impeachment of a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”) Jones also called for Trump’s impeachment, saying his threats were “the definition of genocide.”
They are not alone on the MAGA right. Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign official who helped win his election in 2016 and briefly served as a senior adviser during his first term, has become more critical of the war and recently hosted a guest who suggested that Trump’s threats could constitute “war crimes” if carried out. Mike Cernovich, another conspiracy-minded far-right, suggested that Trump had not only lost touch with the movement but was “silly to claim Trump is MAGA” largely because of the war. As far as factional battles go, this one doesn’t present much drama, at least in the short term: None of these figures have anywhere near Trump’s current level of influence.
