The attack on Iran opens a rift in the MAGA world for Trump

For some time now, it has been clear that the ideals of the MAGA world can be summed up in a single one: whatever their leader, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, says.

This Saturday, Trump stated that Washington had launched, in alliance with Israel, a massive attack against Iran with the aim of forcing a regime change in that country. This not only breaks his repeated campaign promises of not sending the United States into wars abroad; it also directly conflicts with the great MAGA slogan: America First. Does prioritizing the interests of the United States mean overthrowing the brutal dictatorship of the ayatollahs, who have been in power since 1979?

The answer is no, according to former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG), who was once one of the president’s most loyal allies in the Capitol until her fall from grace and subsequent resignation from politics, as she had moved to the uncomfortable side of those opposing Trump. MTG wrote on X: “The Trump admin actually asked in a poll how many casualties voters were willing to accept in a war with Iran??? How about ZERO you bunch of sick fucking liars. We voted for America First and ZERO wars.”

In another message, the former representative from Georgia shared a video of a school that was attacked during the early morning bombings, where, according to Iranian authorities, dozens of people died, many of them girls. She accompanied it with this text: “I did not vote for this, in elections or Congress. This is heartbreaking and tragic. And how many more innocent will die? What about our own military? This is not what we thought MAGA was supposed to be. Shame!” With these messages, MTG, who announced this week “the end of MAGA” if Trump decided to attack Iran, summarized the rift that has opened for Trump among his most loyal supporters.

There are those who cry out about the broken campaign promises and the betrayal of the isolationist policy that they expected from the leader’s second presidency. And there are also Trump defenders, no matter the cost; among them is activist Laura Loomer, a known Islamophobe, who posted: “Trump will go down in history as a protector of humanity. I hope this is the beginning of his crackdown on Islam in the West.”

Or conservative media outlets such as Fox News, which have gone from praising the “president of peace” to adopting in recent days — while talks continued in Geneva over Iran’s nuclear program — a stance of support, if not outright encouragement, for Trump’s warlike impulses. The Wall Street Journal, another outlet owned by media magnate Rupert Murdoch, for its part published an editorial titled The Ayatollah Is Choosing War.

Some of the most prominent social media accounts within the MAGA movement — from that of podcaster Candace Owens, a champion of conspiracy theories, to that of columnist Cassandra MacDonald — reposted on Saturday a message from pro-Trump activist Charlie Kirk, who was killed last September. The message dates back to June 17, that is, 10 days before the attack ordered by Trump against three storage and enrichment facilities tied to Tehran’s nuclear program. At the time, Kirk described the idea of “regime change” as “pathologically insane.”

Bannon, missing

Kirk was not the only one to raise his voice. The national-populist ideologue Steve Bannon went to the White House in those days to try to persuade Trump, who in the first hours after the new strike was nowhere to be seen, besieged as he is by his ties to the millionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

In truth, both warnings proved exaggerated; the June operation was ultimately filed away by the Pentagon as a military success, though Trump overstated it by claiming it had achieved the “obliteration” of Iran’s nuclear capability. That bombing also marked the end of the so-called “12-day war” with Israel and did not trigger a regional cataclysm or a civil war.

That outcome, combined with the January 3 operation to capture the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores — which also failed to unleash instability — has emboldened Trump on the international stage. It has also, in recent days — along with the fear of becoming, like MTG, the target of the leader’s wrath — softened criticism from a segment of the America First camp at the prospect of a new strike against Iran.

Not so for radio host Tucker Carlson, who, shortly after learning of it, described the military operation to ABC News as “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Carlson, whose ties to Qatar are well known, also said it would “shuffle the deck” of the MAGA movement “in a profound way.”

Whether the far-right influencer is right will depend on the consequences of Saturday’s strike. Or whether all of this ultimately serves to prove the ability of Trump’s loyalists to adapt to rules that for some time now can be summed up in a single principle: whatever the leader says.