The MAGA Civil War Just Widened

Trump is driving away a key faction within the GOP

Screenshot from the Tucker Carlson Show

On top of the war Trump launched against Iran on Friday, he also launched a MAGA civil war, this time with the America First faction of the Republican Party.

His campaign had sought their votes by heralding Trump as the “peace president” in 2024 and warning that Kamala Harris would start another Middle East war.

Things were already fairly fraught with the America Firsters after Trump’s military actions in Iran and Venezuela and his support for granting more H-1B visas to foreign workers.

Now the open-ended war with Iran, which Trump launched alongside Israel, has proven too much for many of them. Even some of his formerly staunchest allies are in open revolt.

Trump picks fights with big names on the right

Tucker Carlson has been a consistent critic of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, so it’s unsurprising that he was highly critical of the war with Iran. He even called the attack “absolutely disgusting and evil” on his show.

Trump was dismissive of Carlson, insisting the popular right-wing talking head could “say whatever he wants” but that his opinion “has no impact on me.”

“I think MAGA is Trump,” he told The Inner Circle’s Rachael Bade. “MAGA wants to see our country thrive and be safe. And MAGA loves what I’m doing — every aspect of it.”

Really? Marjorie Taylor Greene sure doesn’t. “We’re in another fucking war, and American troops are being killed,” she declared on Megyn Kelly’s show. “We need to have a serious conversation about what the fuck is happening to this country.”

For her own part, Kelly reported that four U.S. service members had been killed and that Trump had not ruled out sending U.S. ground troops into battle. She told her listeners that she had “serious doubts about what we are doing” in Iran.

As Mediaite further reported,

Megyn Kelly went off on the Trump administration on Monday, arguing that the claim Iran was about to launch a preemptive strike against the U.S. is nonsense. Kelly, while hosting her eponymous Sirius XM show, took a swipe at CNN’s Scott Jennings for parroting some of the administration’s talking points on the reasoning behind the attack on Iran over the weekend.

“Does it make any sense to you that Iran was planning preemptive strikes against us and our civilians, knowing full well of the massive military assets we had moved into the region, the aircraft carriers and so on? Obviously, it doesn’t,” Kelly concluded, while saying she would never repeat such a claim — like Jennings did — because she would not “allow them to use me like a fool.”

In his interview with Rachael Bade, Trump retorted that Kelly “should study her history book a little bit.”

“Megyn was opposed to me for years when I ran the first time and nothing stopped me,” Trump continued. “And so, you know, some people are against — and they always come back. She came all the way back. But now I guess she maybe doesn’t like the idea of this war, but I do because I have to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Iranians.”

Trump is losing the manosphere

From Joe Rogan to podcast bros like Andrew Schultz and Theo Von, Trump has been bleeding support ever since he and his Justice Department began their massive cover-up of the Epstein files and Homeland Security unleashed ICE upon American cities.

Now, other prominent figures in the manosphere—who routinely advance a grotesque version of masculinity before their audiences of terminally-online, disaffected young men—are actively speaking out against the war.

Andrew Tate, who filmed himself in Dubai as the war with Iran began, tweeted “NOBODY WANTS THIS WAR.”

The Hodge Twins, known for their right-leaning comedy and ardent past support of Trump, warned their three and a half million followers that Americans were “getting sent to die for Israel,” adding that they “Don’t care if we lose all our followers over this war we won’t stay quiet…”

I should note that Democrats need not and should not make common cause with rapists and misogynists. But here, truly, the left need not lift a finger; the call is already coming from inside the house.

The fascists and kooks are calling Trump out, too

Deeper in the bowels of the far right, Groyper white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes, wild conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones, and Christian Nationalists such as Matt Walsh are very unhappy with Trump lately. Across this dangerous and unbalanced set, which powers much of the far right machinery, the Iran War is quickly proving too much.

Nick Fuentes, who once dined at Mar-a-Lago as Trump’s guest and whose platforming by Carlson tore apart the Heritage Foundation, told his followers, “Do not vote in the midterms, and if you do, VOTE DEMOCRAT! This administration needs to be SHUT DOWN!”

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend here, but if Fuentes wants to sap GOP turnout on his own, I won’t raise a fuss.

I also rarely quote anything Alex Jones says, except for comedic value, but on Iran he’s been raising alarms. Jones warned, “Trump’s HUGE gamble accelerates the world’s trajectory toward a nuclear world war”—and he is not incorrect.

And perennial nominee for worst person on the Internet, Matt Walsh, whom I personally despise, lamented, with no small dose of truth,

I can’t take the gaslighting, guys. I really can’t. Conservatives are now running around saying “Iran has been waging war on us for 47 years.” Okay then why didn’t any of you call for an attack on Iran at any point until now? Why didn’t you make a case for Trump “ending the war, not starting it” until precisely the moment when Trump did it? You and I both know that you are latching onto a talking point you never used until 45 seconds ago. You and I both know that almost every conservative influencer in the business was opposed to war with Iran until just now.

Draining away MAGA enthusiasm

It’s hard to imagine a series of actions that, collectively, could better drive away Trump’s most ardent and reliable voters. But over the first year of his second term, Trump has managed to do so.

With white working class voters, Trump’s tariffs have driven up prices, with inflation now clocking in higher and manufacturing jobs fleeing, even while the GOP is yanking the safety net out from under them.

With the QAnon set, Trump’s and the DOJ’s repeated attempts to shut down the Epstein investigation and hide Trump’s involvement have many waking up. They are slowly realizing that the man who was supposed to bring the storm down on the pedophiles in the highest reaches of our government is actually at the center of them all.

Trump has now managed to alienate yet another large segment of voters who somehow bought the idea that Democrats are a party of warmongers—even though it was Reagan and the two Bushes who began multiple global conflicts and embroiled us in forever wars in the Middle East. Now Trump is continuing that time-honored GOP tradition, after expressly promising not to, and the America Firsters either have to join in the national gaslighting or become critics of the Trump regime, as Carlson and Greene have done.

It’s small wonder that the GOP is now suffering from an enthusiasm gap compared to the Democrats. The midterms usually favor whichever party can turn out its base of high propensity, engaged voters. These are the same voters, by the way, whom Trump would need to buy into any outlandish and false claims of election fraud. If the polls in advance of the election are uniformly abysmal because much of MAGA has abandoned Trump, any “stolen election” claims by him are likely to fall on deaf ears.

And if the war with Iran drags on, or Trump really does send in U.S. ground forces, his support from the “no foreign wars” faction could collapse entirely. This would shave a few more critical points off GOP election tallies nationwide, putting not only the House but also the Senate into serious play.