Table of Contents
1. Trump’s bombing of Iran laid bare a deep factional split. Expect it to reappear soon.
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
2. As a leftist in the Trump era
As a leftist in the Trump era, I have often sheepishly envied the unanimity of the MAGA movement. While Democrats (rightly!) wail about spineless, sycophantic Republicans who never stand up to the president, who will change their ideological priors to align with his whims, a small, shabby voice in my head sometimes says, “But how about that message discipline …” Surely there is something disturbing about a political party so loath to publicly criticize its leader’s decisions — no matter how stupid — but the little Leninist in me cannot help but admire the ruthless self-control of the MAGA cadre.
So it was with a mix of surprise, dismay, and Schadenfreude that I watched — following Israel’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, scientists, and military leadership on June 12 — as open, acrimonious debate emerged within the MAGA coalition. For the first time, cracks appeared in the edifice. There have been disagreements before (over abortion, for example, and for a short time, over COVID vaccines, which Trump initially championed), but nothing like this. “You’re seeing this expose the first real fissure on the right since Trump’s been president,” a former administration official told me in the week before Trump decided to join its ally in bombing the Islamic Republic.
The split fell along existing factional lines, dividing the more radical, isolationist, and online right from the older, more institutional, and neoconservative flank of the party. On one side were MAGA celebrities such as Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon, who warned that U.S. involvement — especially in a protracted war — would betray the base. (“Trump smartly ran against starting new wars,” Posobiec tweeted. “This is what the swing states voted for.”) On the other side were hawks: U.S. senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, Fox News personality Mark Levin, and Mark Dubowitz of the neocon Foundation for Defense of Democracies, all of whom had long nursed dreams of regime change in Iran. (As Graham put it on June 17: “Wouldn’t the world be better off if the Ayatollahs went away and were replaced with something better?
3. As bombs fell over Tehran
As bombs fell over Tehran and Tel Aviv, Bannon’s War Room podcast became a round-the-clock antiwar room. Meanwhile, Fox News filled block after block with fanfare for the Israeli offensive and fearmongering over the Iranian nuclear threat. (“The world cannot experience another Holocaust,” intoned Sean Hannity.) Carlson eviscerated Cruz in a widely viewed two-hour interview, during which Cruz blithely advocated regime change while revealing a startling ignorance of basic facts about the nation he wished to bombard. (I’ll admit, it was a rare thrill to watch Carlson use his particular skill set, his mocking incredulity and scorn, to flay the unctuous Cruz; it’s no wonder people who share the rest of Carlson’s views find him so compelling.) National Review, reviving its Bush-era “unpatriotic conservatives” canard, accused antiwar conservatives of forming, with Bernie Sanders and Rashida Tlaib, “a uniparty of opposition to resisting America’s sworn enemies.” Each side impugned the loyalty of the other, wrapping themselves in the mantle of true MAGA.
According to sources inside the administration, the debate at the White House was playing out much as it was in front of the cameras. The outside game was the inside game, all performed for an audience of one.
“The dynamic is totally new,” Sohrab Ahmari, the founder of Compact magazine, told me. Ahmari, an Iranian-born former neoconservative turned populist, vociferously opposed U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict and agitated his contacts within the administration to do the same. Curt Mills, the editor of The American Conservative, a noninterventionist redoubt, called the conflict “fratricidal.”
4. Not patricidal, though, mind you.
Despite the intensifying quarrel, both sides knew that influencing Trump’s decision required a certain finesse. A few days before the administration sent seven B-2 bombers and dozens of fighter jets into Iranian airspace, a GOP staffer on Capitol Hill told me that everyone attempting to sway the president was “trying to frame their arguments as the pro-Trump argument.” The key was to effusively praise the president while couching one’s own policy preferences as the true essence of his agenda, which must be defended against those who disagree. No one I spoke to was deluded about Trump’s vanity; all understood that the path to influence ran through the dark heart of his narcissism.
When Trump finally announced that the U.S. had bombed Iranian nuclear sites at Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow — claiming, absurdly, that the attack had “completely and totally obliterated” the facilities — he nonetheless seemed to want to avoid the impression of having chosen a side. Yes, he had done Israel’s bidding; the hawks had long demanded a direct confrontation with Iran, and they got one. But almost immediately, Trump spoke of peace. On Sunday morning, Vice-President J.D. Vance told ABC, “We are not at war with Iran. We are at war with Iran’s nuclear program” — a bit of sophistry, but clearly a signal to assuage the anti-interventionists.
But then, several hours later, as if worried his administration’s position was becoming too clear, Trump went on Truth Social to muse about toppling the mullahs. “If the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???”
5. The next day, he announced a cease-fire.
Publicly, the hawks celebrated a win. Ted Cruz posted on X: “Bravo, Mr. President! It turns out (as I argued at length), that Tucker was wrong, and President Trump was RIGHT!” Others ridiculed the “panicans” who had failed to trust Trump’s infallible instincts. But as the cease-fire held — with some profane encouragement from Trump on Tuesday morning — the hawks seemed to come down from their high. Had enough been accomplished? Would the ayatollahs endure? “No such things as endless ceasefires,” tweeted Mark Dubowitz of FDD. “Only a permanent peace with Iran when the Islamic Republic is no more.” Mark Levin fumed on his radio show, “I hate this word cease-fire. The president hated it a few days ago, too.”
As for the restrainers, the response was mixed — some pessimism, some cope. The day after the American bombs fell, I was told, the atmosphere among younger staffers was “funereal.” But the escalating conflict they predicted didn’t come to pass. After the cease-fire, Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec reverted to base programming. “President Donald Trump demonstrated a masterclass these last couple days,” Kirk said on Fox. And they claimed victory in the factional battle. “The biggest losers are the neocons,” Posobiec crowed on his podcast, “who wanted regime change and a protracted war.”
Several restrainers I spoke to seemed to have had their faith in the president restored. Dropping the bomb was a gift to the Israel hawks, Ahmari told me, but doing so also made the Israelis even more indebted to Trump, and gave him the space to say “enough is enough” when they ask for more. “It would’ve been better to have stayed Israel’s hand from the beginning,” Ahmari said. “But it’s now more wrinkled.
6. For the time being
For the time being, the open war within the MAGA coalition is subsiding. (It’s not quite a cease-fire, but a lowering of temperatures.) But almost everyone I spoke to in recent days agreed the contradictions revealed by the conflict remain unresolved. A younger cohort of MAGA activists, many of whom got jobs in the lower levels of the administration, have begun to seriously doubt the instinctual deference to Israeli prerogatives that reigns in official Washington. They speak openly of the existence of an “Israel lobby” perverting American priorities, using language once only found in leftist magazines and Noam Chomsky books. They perceive a silent caveat to America First — i.e., “Israel Firster” — that can’t be reconciled with foreign-policy realism or U.S. interests. Several young right-wingers pointed me to a clip, which circulated on X after the Iran strikes, of State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce referring to the U.S. as “the greatest country on Earth, next to Israel.”
While they do not express it with the same anguish as their liberal peers, at least some junior MAGA staffers have been repelled by the U.S.-backed massacre of Palestinians in Gaza. As one young Republican operative pointed out, fewer and fewer GOP staffers are coming up through the Evangelical movement, where Christian Zionism is inculcated; rather, those who remain religious tend to attend Catholic mass or some high-church denomination, where the sermons are very unlikely to invoke any biblical obligation to defend Israel.
7. Ahmari said he believes
Ahmari said he believes the urgency and paranoia of Netanyahu and the neocons is a product of their awareness of this shifting climate, that the window of opportunity to achieve their 40-year goal of toppling the Islamic Republic is closing. “They’re facing a generational vice grip,” he said. Tolerance for Israel and eagerness to fight its wars is dwindling in both parties. “They’re used to just saying all of these magic phrases,” the Hill staffer told me. “‘Israel’s our greatest ally.’ ‘Iran is the chief state sponsor of terror.’ ‘The IDF is the most moral army in the world.’ … You just say these bumper-sticker phrases and everyone nods along. But nobody’s nodding anymore, and they’re totally flabbergasted.”
These fights are likely to continue spilling out in public, not least because public sparring is a good way to grab Trump’s attention. For all the sideline theorizing, Trump still decides what MAGA means, as he frequently reminds his followers. Getting your way in Trump’s Washington isn’t as much about winning arguments as winning favor.
“It’s the battle of the Murdoch empire versus the podcast bros,” said the former administration official. “Whoever wins determines matters of war and peace. I wish it were different, but that’s the reality.” Whereas Fox News continues to provide a morphine drip of anti-Iran bellicosity to the older GOP cohort, the earbuds of junior Republican staffers are tuned into anti-interventionist — and increasingly Israel-skeptical — content from Carlson, Bannon, Kirk, and even the pipsqueak antisemite Nick Fuentes.
8. Trump, for better or worse
Trump, for better or worse, is not a podcast zoomer but a cable-news boomer. “The president still has Fox News brain,” said the former official. It’s this that explains a seeming contradiction about the past few weeks. With few important exceptions — e.g., CENTCOM general Michael Kurilla and CIA director John Ratcliffe — Trump’s foreign-policy team is stacked with restrainers. Vance, by all accounts the most online member of the administration, is largely aligned with Carlson, Bannon, and the many anonymous conservative accounts he regularly consults with on X. (Tucker’s son, Buckley, works in Vance’s office.) Marco Rubio is, I’m told, a born-again realist of sorts, and the officials on Mahogany Row in the State Department are even more so. And yet, the hawks, at least initially, carried the day. Why? Because Trump, when he wants to take the temperature of the base, doesn’t listen to podcasts or go on X; he goes on Truth Social and watches Fox. Several sources told me they suspect Trump might never have gotten involved in the war if Tucker Carlson still had a show on Fox. “There’s no one there to question it,” Carlson grumbled on his podcast on June 23. “There was a guy to question it, but they fired him a couple years ago.”
9. Is it good that life-or-death
Is it good that life-or-death decisions affecting the entire human race are contingent on the media diet of a mercurial octogenarian? No it is not. Several sources close to the administration insisted that Trump’s decision-making process, haphazard as it may seem, is a product of his Jacksonian small-d democratic instincts: He is sensitive to the fears and desires of his followers. At least, they say, he is not governed or motivated by the theological certainty or hubris of the neoconservatives. (There are worse things than having no ideology; for instance, there is having a bad one.) What looks like capriciousness and indecision from the outside, perhaps, is really prudence, reckoning with changing conditions, a Burkean politics of adjustment.
I don’t buy it. What does seem clear is that the fissures within MAGA revealed by “the 12-Day War,” as Trump has cheerfully dubbed it, are not going away. And they will continue to be adjudicated by podcasters and cable-TV hosts — all for an audience of one: the most powerful idiot in world history
By Sam Adler-Bell, a frequent contributor to New York
