This official White House photograph released on the White House X account, shows US President Donald Trump, speaking to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, watched by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio while monitoring the US attack on Iran, from an unnamed location on Sunday. Photo / The White House via AFP
United States President Donald Trump’s major attack on Iran has rattled parts of the coalition that twice delivered him the White House, a fracture that could spell trouble for a divided GOP as the Midterm elections approach.
The strikes, which killed Iran’s supreme leader, followed a visible build-up of US forces in the Middle East.
Trump’s decision to carry them out nonetheless surprised some of his supporters, who had expected the self-described anti-interventionist president to stop short of a direct attack.
Nineteen-year-old Cooper Jacks said his phone lit up with messages from fellow Republicans in “disbelief” at the US attack on Iran - a reaction that reflected not just surprise at Trump’s decision, but anxiety about what a new conflict could demand of younger Americans.
“We often have politicians that are way past the age to be able to fight these wars being all ready to say, yeah, go fight it, and then that burden falls on my generation,” said Jacks, an officer with the Walker County Republican Party in Georgia.
For some voters, Trump’s decision marked a clear break from the isolationist posture that once defined his political appeal.
While the more hawkish wing heralded the opening salvo, others in the party accused Trump of betraying the populist ideology that propelled him to power.
In interviews and on social media, many Trump supporters - both prominent conservatives and rank-and-file voters - were careful to withhold final judgment until seeing whether the President could swiftly end the conflict he started. Others reaffirmed their support for Trump.
Ultimately, the Iran strike poses a test of how much war Trump’s coalition will tolerate from a president who promised to end them - particularly if a prolonged fight brings economic pain to everyday Americans.
“The base is solid with President Trump, and they want him to succeed,” said John McLaughlin, a longtime Trump pollster. “It’s about national security and stopping Iran, a terrorist state, from getting nuclear weapons and killing any more Americans.”
The political stakes of the military action are heightened by the approaching Midterm elections, when the party of a sitting president often faces stiff headwinds.
Polls show Trump’s approval ratings are at 39%, the lowest since the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Republicans are worried they could lose control of Congress.
Beyond the immediate electoral math, the Iran strike has also sharpened a longer-running debate inside the party over what a post-Trump identity might look like - and which faction of a divided GOP will ultimately dominate.
Blake Neff, the producer of The Charlie Kirk Show, wrote on X that right-leaning friends were messaging him in dismay about Iran:
“This is extremely depressing.”
“Never voting in a national election again.”
Neff warned: “If this war is a swift, easy, and decisive victory, most of them will get over it. But if the war is anything else, there will be a lot of anger.”
Trump told Axios yesterday that he had several “off-ramps” to the conflict. But in a Truth Social post later that day he said the bombing “will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
Hours later, he warned of further escalation.
“Iran just stated that they are going to hit very hard today, harder than they have ever hit before,” he wrote on Truth Social. “THEY BETTER NOT DO THAT, HOWEVER, BECAUSE IF THEY DO, WE WILL HIT THEM WITH A FORCE THAT HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE!”
Last week, a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 46% of Trump voters supported Trump using the US military to force changes in other countries, while 22% opposed this and 30% had no opinion.
Trump won his first term by attacking the foreign policy of former president George W. Bush and calling the US war in Iraq a “big fat mistake”.
He clinched a second term promising to expel “the warmongers” from government and warning that his Democratic opponent, former Vice-President Kamala Harris, would get the US entangled in another costly conflict abroad. He told supporters he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours.
“I will stop the chaos in the Middle East,” Trump told the crowd at his final rally before the 2024 election in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I will prevent World War III.”
On the campaign trail, he also stressed that Iran must not get a nuclear weapon.
Trump has repeatedly cast himself in his second term as the peacemaker the world needs, claiming credit for ending or averting conflicts abroad and arguing that his leadership will accomplish what traditional international institutions, such as the United Nations, have not.
He swept into office under the banner of “America First” isolationism but has adopted a muscular foreign policy approach, “peace through strength”.
He bombed nuclear sites in Iran in the summer, toppled Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January and now has unleashed a barrage in the Middle East that he said is aimed at regime change.
MAGA allies long sceptical of foreign intervention have so far largely stuck by the President, even as many questioned his evolution.
Trump officials cast the strikes on Iran last summer as a limited intervention meant to take out a nuclear threat - and pushback within his coalition faded as the conflict ended without morphing into a broader war.
But each conflict has threatened more entanglement abroad than the last, testing the movement’s tolerance.
“Trump, who is very news-cycle savvy, is addicted to the glamour and the attention that foreign interventions engender him and his Administration, even though they are not making him more popular,” Curt Mills, executive director of American Conservative, a right-wing magazine that is sceptical of neoconservative foreign policy, said in an interview with the Washington Post.
Natalie Winters, a co-host for Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast “War Room,” criticised the Trump Administration for failing to adequately justify the strikes.
“The messaging, much like the Epstein files, is all over the place. I would think they would know their base better,” she told the Post. “Some of his donors are probably happy so congratulations to them.”
Meanwhile, many of Trump’s most loyal supporters have echoed his “peace through strength” arguments. Nearly six in 10 Trump voters who identified with the MAGA movement supported using the US military to force changes in other countries, compared with fewer than three in 10 who didn’t support MAGA, the Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found.
“I changed my view on MAGA a little bit. In order for us to be what we once were, we’ve got to support the rest of the world,” said Robert Pratt, 70, a veteran who self-identifies as part of the MAGA movement.
“We’ve got to protect our allies, and I think MAGA is now a part of that. It’s not just about us.”
Pratt said his feelings could change if the conflict in Iran lasts for too long; he doesn’t want a repeat of the war in Iraq.
“My concept of war is a lot like Trump’s is: If you’re going to do it, do it and get it over with,” he said. “I don’t want stuff where we get mixed up in some conflict that goes on for years and years.”
Yesterday, as Trump continued to direct attacks in Iran, Jacks saw on social media an old tweet from Vice President JD Vance urging the US to learn from the failures of its war in Iraq.
His former congressional representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump ally turned critic, accused the President of abandoning his “America First” movement and campaign promises to stay out of far-flung conflicts.
“Now, America is going to be force fed and gas lighted all the ‘noble’ reasons the American ‘Peace’ President and Pro-Peace administration had to go to war once again this year, after being in power for only a year,” Greene wrote in a blistering post on X. “Head-spinning, but maga.”
Then Jacks read in the news that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed - a major blow against an oppressive regime, he thought.
The US strike could be a big success, he said - “if we’re not entering a long-term military conflict that’s going to result in the deaths of Americans that don’t really want to fight it”.
- Scott Clement contributed to this report.
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.