The News
MAGA loyalists trying to deter President Donald Trump from bombing Iran this week are at a disadvantage: They have only three real Republican allies in Congress, and Trump hasn’t been listening to them.
“Unconditional surrender — that means I’ve had it,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday as he acknowledged he’s openly wrestling with whether to directly strike Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility. “I give up, no more. Then we go blow up all the nuclear stuff that’s all over the place there.”
Trump, who campaigned on avoiding unnecessary US military entanglements and declared in 2019 that “GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE,” has scrambled the coalition that put him back in office as he weighs striking Iran. But even as some “America First” pundits go on a tear, they’re standing relatively alone in official Washington.
One camp of Republicans on the Hill supports regime change in Iran, and a US role in forcing it — a goal of the party’s hawks since long before Trump took office. Another GOP camp supports Trump giving a free hand to Israel, but with little or limited US aid. The last Republican camp, by far the smallest, wants Trump to cut Israel off.
Only three GOP members of the House and Senate have criticized Trump’s new posture or demanded a vote to prevent US intervention. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s criticized her party for focusing too much on Israel, has blamed “neocon warmongers” for risking American lives.
Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie, the libertarian-minded conservatives from Kentucky, have respectively urged the president to negotiate with Iran, and introduced a resolution that would require congressional approval to intervene on the side of Israel.
“The president has shown restraint in the past,” Paul told reporters on Tuesday. “The president’s instincts are good. And I’m hoping the president will not get involved with the war. I think if the United States actively bombs Tehran, the possibility of negotiation goes out the window.”
In this article:
Know More
Republican leaders have supported Trump’s decision-making to the hilt, ignoring Paul, Massie, and Greene. Other “America First” Republicans, who see the president as a bulwark against any new commitment to a foreign war, have picked a fight not with Trump but with more hawkish Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Sen. Ted Cruz R-Texas, who want the US to help overthrow the Iranian theocracy.
“We don’t need another endless war in the Middle East,” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., told CNN on Tuesday. “We need to take a deep breath and slow down this thing and let the Israelis do their thing.”
Most Republicans have positioned themselves close to Burchett: backing support for Israel, but nothing else. Polling conducted for The Economist by YouGov, from the night of Israel’s first strikes through Monday, found just 19% of 2024 Trump voters in favor of America “get[ting] involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran.”
Republicans who want a deeper US role — who, like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, want to force regime change — have gotten flack from MAGA commentators. The president’s more anti-intervention backers can credibly say that most Trump voters are skeptical of the hawks.
In a nearly two-hour interview this week, Tucker Carlson questioned Cruz on basic facts about Iran, on the Biblical basis of support for Israel, and on whether supporting the country in a conflict with Iran was in the US’ best interest.
“You engage in reckless rhetoric with no facts,” Cruz snapped at Carlson, reading directly from a Trump statement responding to critics who said he was betraying “America First” ideals: “There can be no peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon.”
But Carlson and Cruz agreed that Trump had been consistent in vowing he would act if necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The issue, said Carlson, was about involving the US in another quagmire of a conflict: “We should be very careful about entering into more foreign wars that don’t help us, when our country is dying.”
And on Wednesday, asked about Carlson, Trump said that they more or less agreed, adding that the host had “called and apologized” for his criticism.
Perhaps the biggest internal casualty of Trump’s tentative yet definitive hawkish turn is his director of national intelligence, the former Democratic congresswoman and military veteran Tulsi Gabbard. She openly warned that “warmongers” were risking the end of civilization, which could come any time two nuclear powers clashed, a stance that appears to have put her on the outs with the president’s inner circle.
But Gabbard’s warnings predated Trump’s current interest in the Netanyahu-centric view of Iranian nuclear capability — a view that US intelligence officials don’t quite share.
“We’re on the brink of World War III in multiple regions of the world,” Gabbard said during a November town hall with Vance in Pennsylvania.
Room for Disagreement
No matter their view of the Israel-Iran war, Republicans agree that Trump ran and won on the no-stupid-wars strategy described by Carlson. Last year, as he brought now-Vice President JD Vance onto the Republican ticket and added non-Republicans like Gabbard to his coalition, Trump reminded voters that the US did not get involved in new wars while he was president.
Trump also made some promises that couldn’t be kept, like an immediate end to war in Ukraine. But he and Vance have described support for Israel as a way to save US lives, not risk them.
“We don’t want a broader regional war. We don’t want to get involved in a broader regional war,” Vance said in a 2024 speech at the Quincy Institute, given before he joined the ticket.
“The best way to do that is to ensure that Israel, with the Sunni nations, can actually police their own region of the world,” Vance added. “And that allows us to spend less time and less resources on the Middle East.”
David’s view
Netanyahu saw this coming. He’s spent decades, in and out of power, telling Americans that they should support Israel to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Videos of him saying that have been ridiculed by the anti-war right this week – one of them, a prediction that removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq would weaken Iran, was conclusively proven wrong.
But sift through the GOP takes on Trump and Iran this month, and you see how Netanyahu’s arguments have permeated the Republican ethos. In the last 10 years, as both parties grew fatigued with wars for “democracy,” Netanyahu compared Israel’s fight for borders and culture with the one Republicans were trying to win in the US.
“President Trump is right,” Netanyahu wrote on Twitter a week into Trump’s first term, when some Republicans were still not sold on a border wall. “I built a wall along Israel’s southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea.”
Netanyahu then successfully lobbied for Trump to pull out of the Obama-negotiated nuclear deal with Iran, which unified Republicans. There are real disagreements inside the MAGA movement about what Trump should be doing now. But the coalition isn’t coming apart, and Democrats aren’t sure what to do if it does.
When I asked Tim Walz last week about potential US military aid for Israel, he said only that he opposed “boots on the ground,” and that Trump had been blowing smoke last year when he said he could prevent war.
That’s the one point of Democratic agreement, from Chuck Schumer to Bernie Sanders: Trump fooled some voters when he ran as a peacemaker.
At least Paul, Massie, and Greene might agree at this point.
Notable
- At the Christian Science Monitor’s reporter breakfast, Steve Bannon said that MAGA voters would come around on whatever decision Trump made. “Look. We trust your judgment. You’ve walked us through this. We don’t like it. In fact, maybe we hate it. But, you know, we’ll get on board.”
- In Axios, Stephen Neukam, Stef Kight, and Marc Caputo have the latest on Gabbard trying to navigate the administration and involve herself in Trump’s decision.