US President Donald Trump takes questions from the media in the Oval Office of the White House. Photo / Getty Images
As United States President Donald Trump directs military strikes on Iran, he’s also fighting online attacks at home from some of the loudest voices in his MAGA political movement.
“This is Israel’s war. This is not the United States’ war,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said yesterday on his weekly political podcast.
“No one should have to die for a foreign country,” Megyn Kelly, another former Fox News host with a massive online following, said on her podcast on Tuesday.
Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh beseeched fellow conservatives on Tuesday to stop supporting Trump’s military campaign. “I can’t take the gaslighting, guys. I really can’t,” he wrote on X.
MAGA critics of Trump’s new military conflict say they’re struggling to reconcile it with his “America First” principles and long record of criticising costly and protracted American military interventions.
The US President has said operations against Iran could go on for four to five weeks, or longer.
“I think to them it feels legitimately like a betrayal on a fundamental tenet of Trumpism,” said Matthew Dallek, a professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management.
Trump has dismissed the idea that his critics could speak for the Make America Great Again movement: “MAGA is Trump,” he said in an interview with independent journalist Rachael Bade on Tuesday.
Online infighting is common in political movements, but Dallek said the degree of open dissent among conservatives over Iran suggested it could be a “breaking point” for some of Trump’s most influential supporters.
Carlson, Kelly and Walsh together list more than 13 million subscribers between them on YouTube, with millions more on X and other platforms.
Trump claimed that he alone spoke for MAGA after Bade asked him about the rebellion in the ranks of his supporters, according to a post she published.
“MAGA wants to see our country thrive and be safe. And MAGA loves what I’m doing - every aspect of it,” he said.
White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales echoed the President’s comments in a statement to the Washington Post yesterday.
“President Trump is MAGA and MAGA is President Trump,” she wrote in an email.
“With Operation Epic Fury, President Trump is putting America first, eliminating the threat to our people, and securing our Nation and world for generations to come,” she added.
Trump has made opposition to foreign military intervention a cornerstone of his political platform since he first sought the presidency.
In the 2016 Republican primary, he called the Iraq War “a big, fat mistake” as he sought to tie rival Jeb Bush to his brother George W. Bush’s unpopular legacy.
Running against Democrat Kamala Harris in 2024, Trump called himself “the candidate of peace” and said in his election night victory speech: “I’m not going to start a war”.
Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist for part of his first term in office, warned that turnaround could become a political problem for the President.
He criticised the Iran operations after a guest on his War Room podcast over the weekend suggested the conflict could be “a hard slog”.
“I’m just going to be brutally frank,” Bannon said. “That was not pitched in the 2024 campaign. It just wasn’t. We’re going to bleed support.”
Whitney Phillips, a professor of information politics at the University of Oregon, said the President was severely testing his supporters’ loyalty.
“Trump has put these people in such an impossible position,” she said.
“He’s not asking them to bend a little - he’s asking them to entirely reconfigure themselves into a new kind of balloon animal.”
Walsh, who has long urged Trump to take a hard line on immigration, transgender people and diversity policies, is among the MAGA influencers refusing to reconfigure.
He criticised the Administration’s “confused” messaging on the justification for the Iran operation in an X post on Tuesday that drew a lengthy response from Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. Her X post listed what she called the “clear objectives” of Trump’s military campaign.
Instead of Walsh and others falling in line, an online fracas ensued. Some X users mused that Walsh might be fired by Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro, who had opened his own podcast on Monday by lauding the operation that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Shapiro did not respond to a request for comment.
Walsh stepped up his online campaign against Trump’s strategy, taking aim at his fellow Trump supporters.
“Conservatives are now running around saying ‘Iran has been waging war on us for 47 years,’” Walsh posted on X.
“Okay, then why didn’t any of you call for an attack on Iran at any point until now? … You and I both know that almost every conservative influencer in the business was opposed to war with Iran until just now.”
Laura Loomer, a right-wing influencer who has described herself as “Trump’s loyalty enforcer”, has used her own online platform to attack critics of the war and sought to enlist Trump in hitting back at them.
She posted on X that she had spoken to Trump and congratulated him, but also told him about the criticism he was receiving from Carlson, Kelly, Representative Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) and former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) - a group she lumped in with “communist Democrats”.
“I’m so glad I was able to speak to President Trump after the strikes on Iran and show him what the Woke Reich, including Tucker, Megyn, and Marjorie Traitor Greene have been saying about him,” Loomer added yesterday.
“He was not happy when I showed him, but he told me he is focused on winning and they aren’t.”
Conservative figures opposing the war appear to be in the minority despite the attention their criticism has generated.
An analysis by the Post of about 5000 online posts, podcasts and newsletters from 79 conservative politicians and commentators since the Iran conflict began last weekend showed that most supported the operation, but that more than a dozen criticised it at least some of the time.
Only a few were staunchly opposed to Trump’s new military intervention in Iran.
While Trump returned to office amid a wave of online loyalty from leading conservative voices, experts in political communication said that in just a few days the Iran attacks had begun to test the limits of his influence.
A.J. Bauer, a professor of journalism at the University of Alabama, said the pushback has gained traction in part because the Administration has struggled to articulate a clear message on Iran for the right to rally around.
That has left conservative influencers to chart their own course based on their personal beliefs, their loyalty to Trump and their assessment of the risk that the conflict becomes unpopular with MAGA voters.
A flash poll conducted by the Post over the weekend found that Americans oppose Trump ordering airstrikes on Iran by 52% to 39%; 9% said they were unsure.
Sam Rosenfeld, a professor of political science at Colgate University, said the influencer backlash over Iran also speaks to wider problems emerging for Trump. His approval rating was 39% ahead of last month’s State of the Union address.
There is an “emerging sense that Trump’s centrality to right-wing politics has an endpoint in the not-so-distant future,” said Rosenfeld.
“That all serves to loosen Trump’s symbolic grip on the right’s discourse.”
- Jeremy B. Merrill contributed to this report.
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