Trump is crushing conservative anti-war dissent over his Iran strikes

The Hill

a day ago

The rift within President Trump's MAGA movement over his decision to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities is deepening.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) described the airstrikes as 'not constitutional' and denounced Trump's comments about regime change in Tehran, posting, 'This is not America First folks.'
Trump responded with a broadside on Truth Social in which he described Massie as a 'simple minded 'grandstander'' who is 'disrespectful to our great military.'
Trump has been sparring with the isolationist wing of his own movement over military action in Iran since Israel started bombing. In a conversation with Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson claimed that Trump's coalition is 'being blown up over this war on Iran.'
Trump responded, 'Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that, 'IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!''
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) defended Carlson and complained that 'The Uniparty is out to politically destroy me for opposing regime change in Iran.' Pundit Charlie Kirk worried that the war will 'cause a massive schism in MAGA.'
Conservative critics of the president's decision to join Israel's assault on Iran have long presented Trump as a courageous peacemaker standing up to a warmongering establishment in Washington. They celebrated when Trump declared that the U.S. would abandon Ukraine. Trump blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and NATO for the Russian invasion and drastically reduced U.S. military support for Ukraine. He then attempted to force Kyiv into accepting a terrible deal that would end Ukraine's right to join the alliances of its choosing and consign millions of Ukrainians to permanent occupation, while asking for nothing in exchange from Putin.
Massie boasts that he's the 'only member of Congress who never voted for Ukraine funding.' Carlson has openly declared that he supports Russia over Ukraine. Greene describes Zelensky as an 'actor wearing army green every day, fully funded by U.S. warmongers,' claims he controls a 'Nazi army,' regurgitates Russian propaganda and calls Zelensky a 'little dictator.' It is no wonder that Trump's most rabid 'America First' acolytes believed his absurd promises about ending the Ukraine war in '24 hours.'
The tension between Trump and some of his loudest supporters over the Iran strikes is the result of shattered illusions across the MAGA-verse.
Many Trump supporters really believed that the president had a principled opposition to war, but he has always been a simple opportunist who scored political points by attacking what he views as a hated 'neocon' establishment in Washington.
While pundits within Trump's base are free to attack Trump for what they view as a deviation from America First orthodoxy, self-described anti-war members of the administration are in a trickier spot.
Vice President JD Vance has spent years pouring scorn on what he regards as a sinister warmongering elite in Washington. But he has been reduced to cheerleading for Trump's latest military adventure, which he surely would have indignantly denounced if it was launched by a Democratic administration. 'We're not at war with Iran,' Vance recently said. 'We're at war with Iran's nuclear program.' Vance would have mocked this sort of Orwellian doublespeak in any other context.
In a lengthy post on X, the vice president attempted to reconcile Trump's belligerence toward Iran with his constant promises to end wars rather than start them. 'Of course,' Vance wrote, 'people are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy.' He continued: 'But I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue.' In other words, Trump's attack on Iran is exactly the sort of foreign entanglement he has spent years decrying, but he's unwilling to say so because he is 'admittedly biased towards our president.'
Vance isn't the only member of the administration forced to bend flimsy principles into an entirely new shape to fit Trump's latest diktat. In March, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified to Congress that U.S. intelligence 'continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.' Trump dismissed the assessment of his own DNI to reporters: 'I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to having one.'
Like Vance, hostility toward 'warmongers' in the 'elite' has long been a major feature of Gabbard's political career. She blamed the war in Ukraine on NATO and the Biden administration, which allegedly failed to acknowledge 'Russia's legitimate security concerns.' She has echoed Russian propaganda about Ukraine. Gabbard was fiercely critical of Trump's first-term decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration, and she has spent many years attacking U.S. military involvement in the Middle East.
Vance and Gabbard have discovered the one iron law of contemporary American politics: Joining forces with Trump means discarding your deepest principles to remain in good standing with the boss.
Those who have attempted to give Trump's movement some coherent intellectual and ethical shape have made a similar discovery. As Trump recently claimed, 'America First' means whatever he says it means. Either submit to the new orthodoxy, or get out.
Matt Johnson is the author of the book 'How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment.'