As the military conflict between Israel and Iran raged Monday, the Republican senator Tom Cotton (Ark.) wrote on X that “President Trump created and shaped the Make America Great Again movement and defined America First foreign policy.”
“He is absolutely right that Iran’s terrorist regime cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon,” Cotton added. Cotton wanted people to know that the true definition of “America First” is for the United States to be part of yet another regime-change war.
Makes perfect sense, right? Not for anyone who has actually been paying attention.
Kelley Vlahos, editorial director for Responsible Statecraft, replied to Cotton, “THIS IS NOT AMERICA FIRST. Cotton co-opted this language when he wet his finger and put it up to the wind and figured out the MAGA base was done with neocons. He is a fake.”
Vlahos is right. It was just a month ago that President Donald Trump buried the neoconservatives during his speech in Saudi Arabia: “The so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.” (No modern presidency was more associated with “nation-building” than that of George W. Bush, a legacy Trump vehemently rejected early in the 2016 GOP presidential debates.)
The president said next, “The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called ‘nation-builders,’ neocons, or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Baghdad, so many other cities.”
Despite what is transpiring right now between Israel, Iran, and the United States, it was Trump’s Saudi speech that most clearly laid out for a global audience what MAGA is supposed to look like on the world stage. On foreign policy, that vision is what 77 million Americans voted for in November and what polls show a majority of Republicans want.
Even if this is not what Trump seems to be doing right now. It’s one thing for realists and non-interventionists to question whether Trump is going back on his word. It’s quite another to pretend this president never said those words.
But from a neoconservative perspective, why wouldn’t Cotton and his friends try to use the current zeitgeist to reorient Republicans toward that old-time religion of the Bush-Cheney GOP?
They are certainly working hard to do so.
The neocon fanatic Mark Levin went on a long screed Monday about what is “Real MAGA and Fake MAGA.” “Real MAGA” in his eyes means anyone who is for war for Israel first. “Fake MAGA” for him means conservatives who might dare to put their own country first.
Levin constantly attacks Tucker Carlson, whose conservative voice, audience, and influence has arguably eclipsed Levin’s at this point, precisely because Carlson is urging Trump not to repeat the foreign policy mistake of Iraq in Iran. Levin also bashed another reliable antiwar voice, Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), as “not MAGA.”
Not surprisingly, the 82-year-old former Republican speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was all about a U.S. war with Iran on X as well.
The Cato Institute’s Brandon Buck shared Gingrich’s post, asking “Do you ever feel like you’re the only person who hasn’t been in a 25 year coma?” The American Conservative’s executive director, Curt Mills, shared Gingrich’s obtuse observations as well, adding, “Old Guard, Baby Boomer conservatives = the greatest threat to the success of the Trump political project.”
“Not even close,” he added.
Through continued and unbroken support, the United States and the Trump administration are aiding and abetting Israel’s actions against Iran already. If this president manages to stumble into a full U.S. war with Iran on Israel’s behalf, everything he ever said about ending “endless wars” will have been for naught. As Iraq will forever be Dubya’s primary legacy, it is likely Trump’s Iran war will become his.
This is exactly what the neoconservatives want most from this Republican administration: oblivious ideologues who still see no fault in what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did. They would very much like a repeat of what Bush-Cheney did and are aching for Donald Trump to give it to them.
He might. If so, it would not be the fulfillment of MAGA—as neocons are now so desperate to pretend—but a complete repudiation of what Donald Trump promised it would be.
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