What the Iran Strikes Reveal About MAGA

For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.

Since Donald Trump returned to office, in January, a number of controversies have appeared to expose tensions within his MAGA movement, or to alienate key members of it: visas for skilled workers (actually, that dispute flared before Trump returned to office); the decision to bomb Yemen; the fact that officials in his Administration added the editor of The Atlantic to a group chat about bombing Yemen, then tried to dodge the blame; tariffs; spending; the deportation of a gay makeup artist to a Salvadoran mega-prison; Trump’s acceptance of a luxury jet as a gift from Qatar; the conspiracy theory that Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t actually murdered; the conspiracy theory that files relating to Epstein’s crimes haven’t been released because Trump appears in them.

Recently, media talk of a “MAGA civil war” reached its apex over the question of whether the U.S. should bomb Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. The former Fox host Tucker Carlson, who opposed such an operation, sparred with two boosters: the current Fox host Mark Levin, and the Republican senator Ted Cruz, whom Carlson revealed to be ignorant of basic facts about Iran in a clip that went viral. Last week, as Israel attacked the Islamic Republic and Trump increasingly seemed keen to join in, MAGA personalities like Charlie Kirk expressed fear that doing so could profoundly fracture Trump’s movement; Kirk polled his X followers on whether the U.S. should get involved, and, of the nearly five hundred thousand respondents, ninety per cent said “No.” Candace Owens, a far-right commentator, accused Trump of betraying his promise not to enter foreign wars. In response, Laura Loomer, another far-right commentator, who earlier this year persuaded Trump to fire various national-security officials, said that she was “screenshotting everyone’s posts” and “going to deliver them in a package to President Trump so he sees who is truly with him and who isn’t.” She added, “I am the loyalty enforcer.”

Some observers found the “civil war” narrative to be overhyped, however. Vice-President J. D. Vance—in the past, a vocal critic of U.S. interventionism—laid down a template for any Trump adherents looking to thread the needle, writing on X that, although “people are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy,” Trump had “earned some trust” to act responsibly. Later, Vance would say, on “Meet the Press,” that the difference between this campaign and wars past is that, “back then, we had dumb Presidents.” Trump had bombed Iran the night before Vance’s appearance on the show, and by this point headlines were suggesting that MAGA had mostly fallen in line. “Opinions are like assholes,” Loomer wrote, taking a victory lap. “Everyone has one. Some are cleaner than others, but if you get too close to the hole, you’re going to end up with shit all over your face.” Kirk credited Trump with a “historic masterclass.” After Iran indicated that it wouldn’t escalate, Carlson posted “Thank God,” then went back to dunking on Levin.

There are several reasons, it seems to me, why MAGA didn’t ultimately tear itself in two over the Iran strikes. The way the story unfolded offered something for everyone: the hawks within the movement got to claim that Trump acted decisively to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat, while the doves, if that’s the right word, got to claim that Trump showed restraint and, after Israel and Iran (eventually) committed to a ceasefire, made peace. (This dynamic is familiar—be it a reflection of political savvy or incoherence—as I explored in a recent column about how Trump has managed simultaneously to throw meat to traditional “small-government” Republicans and to those who see a more expansive role for the state.) Above all, perhaps, MAGA diehards understand that Trump is both the charismatic glue holding an otherwise disparate movement together and its wrathful enforcer—what he says goes. (While the Iran story was unfolding, he waged social-media war on Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman who has opposed both the strikes and Trump’s spending plans.) Two weeks ago, The Atlantic asked Trump about critics who said that backing Israel’s war with Iran was inconsistent with his “America First” agenda, and he responded that the term “wasn’t used until I came along,” so he gets to define it. As is so often the case with Trump, this statement was both literally false—the term dates back at least as far as the eighteen-eighties—and effectively true.

The controversies that I listed at the top of this column didn’t decisively split MAGA either, for a couple of reasons. First, taken together, they haven’t spawned consistent factions: Loomer and Levin, for example, strongly criticized Qatari-jetgate, but enthusiastically backed Trump’s decision to bomb Iran. Second, the extent of the controversies has often been exaggerated: a handful of Trump supporters have stuck their heads above the parapet, the media have sniffed drama and written up stories about friction, and nothing has ultimately changed. It’s not really surprising that the broad ideological coalition put together by Trump last year would have internal disagreements, or that the movement’s macho energy would occasionally lead to a butting of heads. (Exhibit A: Elon Musk, who has fought with Steve Bannon, the Trump consigliere turned podcaster; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; and, of course, Trump himself.) MAGA has remained remarkably unified for a long time, through all sorts of enormous political stress tests.

Happily ever after, then? I’m not so sure. If the narrative of civil war among prominent MAGA influencers is often overblown, these voices do not reflect the full diversity of people who cast their lot with Trump last year, many of whom were never as fully locked in to the MAGA project as Trump’s imperious post-election behavior has suggested. As The Bulwark’s Will Sommer recently noted, “The political threat that Trump may face over attacking Iran won’t come from within the traditional MAGA movement but from the newer people he’s brought into it.” This includes “comedians and tough guys”—such as the podcaster Joe Rogan and the comic Theo Von—who “tend to be anti-war” and “depend on their audiences feeling that they’re authentic, which in part means they’re not tied to any political party.” Von, Rogan, and others like them have often been described as apolitical, and this assessment, true or not, added great weight to their endorsements of Trump. If MAGA influencers disagree on stuff sometimes, they all care a lot about politics. The schism that they may actually need to worry about, I think, is between the obsessives and the casuals.

It’s too soon to say how the Iran strikes played with the latter group. But we already have some clues, and they aren’t uniformly positive for Trump. Last year, the standout moment of his tour of so-called “manosphere” podcasts, widely cast as crucial in his greatly improved performance among young male voters, came when he sat down with Von for a conversation that delved at length into the subject of addiction—Von’s, but also Trump’s brother’s—and showcased Trump as both a sympathetic and empathetic human being, rare public modes for him. The interview also allowed Trump to bathe in the essential conceit that he is not part of the establishment. (“It’s pretty clear that the establishment doesn’t like you,” Von said, in one exceedingly on-the-nose exchange; Trump replied, “I think the people like me.”) Last week, Von, who was interviewing the Democratic congressman Ro Khanna, said that no one he knows supports the Iran strikes. “I don’t want people I know, my friends, getting called up; I don’t want the children of my friends getting called over to die,” he said. “I don’t even understand how it’s an option.”