Donald Trump, in the words of one prominent supporter this week, is “angrily hemorrhaging the coalition that returned him to power“ with his open support for Israel’s onslaught against Iran and his open consideration of direct U.S. involvement.
On Capitol Hill, there already are signs that a new political alliance is emerging in direct defiance of the president’s sudden heel turn.
With Axios reporting Tuesday that the president is now actively considering direct U.S. engagement in the Israeli effort to target Iranian nuclear weapons development facilities, the illusion of Donald Trump as the “peace” candidate is quickly dissolving away.
Signs of peace in Ukraine are nonexistent.
Massacres at aid distribution sites occur in Gaza, where a ceasefire is still not within reach.
And despite touting his first administration’s record of non-engagement in further global conflicts and his relentless campaigning on the issue of a world in chaos in 2024, Trump is now potentially poised to direct U.S. military forces to strike Iran.
Republican opponents of this hawkish neoconservative view of Iran — who supported his administration engaging in the first sustained talks with Tehran in more than a decade — are furious.
Monday dawned in D.C. with that tension boiling over into a dispute between former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Trump, who blasted his one-time staunch ally as “kooky” on Truth Social and reiterated that he was bent on preventing Iran’s government from developing a nuclear weapon.
The president and other administration officials have fought back (without evidence) against reporters and critics who have questioned why the White House believes the Iranian nuclear program is active when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified to the contrary earlier this year.
Steve Bannon, another top figure in Trumpworld, continues to trash the idea of U.S. combat operations.
“We have to stop that,” he told Carlson in a conversation on his War Room podcast Monday, referring to an order for such operations from the White House.
They were joined on Tuesday by Caroline Sunshine, a former deputy communications director for the Trump campaign, who posted an essay on Twitter urging against U.S. military support for the war.
“The USA has nothing to gain from getting involved in another war in the Middle East. Young strong Americans will die early deaths, gas prices will go up as oil rises, China would love seeing us distracted in yet another costly prolonged conflict, and President Trump’s entire domestic agenda of mass deportations for illegal immigrants & tariffs to rebuild the American middle class will be totally derailed by the distraction of war,” she wrote.
“President Trump is a chess player. I pray all of this is an elaborate ruse to get Iran to fold like Reagan did with the USSR,” she added.
Others on the right see the issue, led by Trump’s own decisions and actions, as having the real possibility of irreparably damaging the MAGA voting coalition. Younger voters especially are skeptical of U.S. military interventionism, and younger males made up a growing and significant part of the president’s winning voting bloc in 2024.
On Tuesday, Curt Mills of the American Conservative magazine wrote that the political damage from the Iran conflict was already becoming apparent.
Mills, who wrote that Trump was voluntarily “hemorrhaging” his alliances on the right, was apoplectic about the possibility of the U.S. becoming involved in a drawn-out conflict with Iran — it was evident across his Twitter feed.
Like Bannon, Mills and other “paleo” conservatives fret that a war with Iran could become the same kind of protracted struggle that led to the occupation of Iraq and subsequent war against the Islamic State, or the pullout of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and collapse of the democratic Afghan government in the face of a Taliban insurgency.
“Tacky jingoism. Will end in tears,” said Mills in a tweet, deriding Trump’s boasting of achieving “total” control of Iranian airspace. “Is that what tens of millions of frustrated and desperate Americans put their faith in this person to achieve? I missed that part. Though heard a lot about ‘no more endless wars’.
“The tragic, full circle of destroying the Bush monarchy only to enact their policy— dangerously complete,” Mills continued, referring to Trump’s public skewering of former Gov. Jeb Bush and his brother, President George W. Bush, during his first run for the presidency. Mills pleaded: “Can still pull back”.
He also warned that the growing and bipartisan group of lawmakers on Capitol Hill signing on to a resolution led by Thomas Massie, a non-MAGA Republican with a libertarian streak and history of bucking Trump, over restricting the president from going to war with Iran was a sign of a strong, unifying political force mobilizing against the president.
Centrist Democrats and progressives alike were coming together around an issue while the national Democratic Party’s battle over its identity rages on. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was one of the first to sign on to Massie’s resolution, which does not yet include any other Republicans.
Some GOPers typically close to the president, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), have already expressed their own opposition to war with Iran. In the Senate, a resolution is being led by Tim Kaine — the center-left Virginia Democrat who was Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016, to give an idea of the breadth of the agreement on the left.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a Pennsylvania progressive who has openly tried to build bridges with populist Republicans, was at it again on Tuesday afternoon. As the possibility of war seemed to draw closer, he made an open appeal for Greene and other House conservatives to sign on to Massie’s resolution.
Their reluctance may be the only political silver lining for Trump in this moment, even if it’s a sign of the president’s own electoral strength, rather than ideological agreement.
Tweeting at Greene, Rep. Chip Roy and others, Khanna issued his rallying call: “We have 14 progressives. Let us show anti war is no longer partisan.”
