Has Trump’s Iran invasion wrecked MAGA? For the White House and its allies, the question is nonsensical: MAGA is whatever Trump says it is. It’s rooted in the words Trump uttered before a single primary vote was cast in 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” It’s reflected in the doctrine of Trump infallibility that permeates the White House. Many Trump supporters have long considered those notions ridiculous, while at the same time recognizing that Trump was exceptional in many ways. They would roll their eyes, chuckle and support him nonetheless. He was, they would say to themselves, actually quite good on very important issues, many of his appointments were first rate. Others have argued that for many low-attention voters, backing Trump has no relation to actual issues anyway; people root for him as a fun disruptive personality, as they might a professional wrestling favorite. These theories are about to be tested.
Up against this is the sheer enormity of Trump’s betrayal—a betrayal obviously not of all his supporters but of those who found his regular critiques of forever wars compelling and thought credible his promotion of himself as the “peace candidate.” This was one of the two salient issues (the other was immigration) that in 2016 separated him from the GOP establishment represented by Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, and in 2024 from Nikki Haley. Trump had, if not exorcised neoconservatism from the GOP foreign policy playbook, demoted it from its previously dominant position. His attack on Iran demonstrated that this view of Trump was completely mistaken, and those who held it feel saddened, shocked, betrayed, and stupid, in various degrees. He lied to his core supporters for years. As someone wrote on social media, the scale of the con is breathtaking.
What does this mean politically for MAGA? Supporters of the war and the Trump administration claim all is fine: Eighty-five percent of Republicans support Trump’s war, though some polls like the Washington Post’s put the figure at 81 percent. George W. Bush went to war with 93 percent Republican support, so from the outset of Trump’s war there are two to three times as many Republicans in opposition as Bush had. Are these war opponents Never-Trump Republicans, GOPers who never liked him because of his character and style, or people who liked him because he was the “peace candidate”? More the last, I would surmise—a big part of “never-Trumpism” was due to his seeming disdain for hawkish GOP foreign policy orthodoxies. In any case, I don’t find 85 percent a particularly impressive display of MAGA support, particularly for a political faction that has never won national elections against Democrats by large margins.
These anti-war Republicans will not be able to constitute a new post-Trump MAGA movement within the Republican party. Their most clear path to continued influence in the GOP was through J.D. Vance, perceived as a genuine foreign policy realist, a young and often brilliant Iraq vet skeptical of promiscuous armed interventions. But Vance can’t oppose the war as vice president. One can’t even imagine a Hubert Humphrey–style resurrection—the strategy of quietly letting it be known to insiders you have doubts about your boss’s war, while relying on your inside track as vice president to secure the nomination. Humphrey had a 20-year record as a good liberal and effective politician to draw upon. Vance was two years in the Senate. He faced a real choice about whether his career would be better served by remaining a senator from Ohio, and was cognizant of the risks; it’s now obvious he chose wrongly.
Perhaps the best analogy to what will happen to the “pro-peace Trumpers” is the Obamacons, former Republicans and conservatives who voted for Barack Obama over “bomb, bomb Iran” John McCain. There were never a lot of them—Nebraska’s Sen. Chuck Hagel and Colin Powell were the most prominent; several were upper-middle-level GOP apparatchiks; National Review’s senior editor Jeffrey Hart was the most interesting. Less prominent was this writer (who endorsed Obama and canvassed for him). But one can imagine that this coterie helped bring some former Bush voters over to Obama. Ten percent of Republicans voted for Obama in 2008, and some data-monitoring political scientists argue that Bush voters switching or sitting the race out were more critical to Obama’s victory than new voters. One key here was that Obama, despite his exotic biography, ran as a mainstream figure; he was clearly antiwar, but his victory or at least the scope of it was in great part due to his seeming to have a greater grasp of the seriousness of the financial crisis than McCain. He did not turn really to the left and begin emphasizing divisive racial politics until after his second victory in 2012.
It is already clear that among “influencers,” the group of conservative defectors from the Trump war far outstrips the 2000s. It includes most obviously Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, Sohrab Ahmari, Matt Walsh, and Ann Coulter. They reach far more people than Jeffrey Hart did. It should be mentioned that Trump has already obliterated any GOP orthodoxy on fiscal matters, so that the brake mechanism of “what about the deficit?” is already moot. Of course the Democratic choice remains to be seen: It might or might not include “defund the police,” transgender transitioning for children, and a return to Biden’s open borders. But if not, it’s easy to imagine a large chunk of the 15–20 percent who oppose Trump’s war sitting the election out or crossing over. The result would be a landslide.
An ancillary casualty of Trump’s war is a project like Yoram Hazoney’s national conservatism. His conferences both helped bring about and reflected a kind of truce between mostly Jewish neoconservatives and moderate paleoconservatives, with emphasis on common ground: borders, the danger of unrestricted immigration, the importance of national economies, the importance of the nation state as a focus for belonging in global society increasingly without moral or actual boundaries. The younger generation of neocons had more or less given up their support for fairly open immigration, chastened perhaps by Muslim migrant terrorism. Foreign policy was on the back burner, and Hazony’s conferences brought together old friends who had split over the Iraq War and the related, more general question of whether Israel’s influence over American foreign policy was excessive. The shared perspectives possible when such issues were distant are obviously out the window, as dead as Vance’s presidential prospects. Both will be missed.
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