The Republican Meltdown Over Iran Is Just Beginning

On Monday, two days after the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran, Megyn Kelly began her SiriusXM show by saying she was praying for American troops, as well as mourning the U.S. servicemembers who already had been killed by retaliatory strikes. But she quickly shifted gears, questioning why soldiers have to “put their lives on the line… for whom, again?”

“My own feeling is no one should have to die for a foreign country. I don’t think those four service members died for the United States,” she said. “I think they died for Iran or for Israel…. Our government’s job is not to look out for Iran or for Israel. It’s to look out for us.”

Kelly is far from alone. Tucker Carlson on Saturday called the war “absolutely disgusting and evil,” and in a lengthy video on Monday said, “It’s hard to say this, but the United States didn’t make the decision here. [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu did.” (Well, it’s not that hard to say that. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have said something similar, albeit as justification for President Trump’s decision.) In more extreme corners, the white supremacist and antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes urged his followers not to vote in the midterms over the war—or otherwise vote for Democrats. Steve Bannon, Trump’s svengali during his 2016 campaign and now a top MAGA podcaster, referred to the war as a “betrayal.”

It’s tempting to call this a MAGA civil war, though that’s not quite right. Even though a huge majority of the country as a whole opposes the war with Iran, a CNN poll found 77 percent of Republicans support it—and there is little sign yet of Trump losing the support of congressional Republicans in particular. Still, it is a crack-up and a serious one, especially given the GOP’s dire outlook for the midterm elections. It points to Trump’s diminishing grip on his own movement. “MAGA is Trump,” the president said when asked about Kelly and Carlson’s criticisms. He’s not wrong, really—he still commands enormous influence over his movement and party. But we are seeing his hold over it truly slip for the first time since his emergence as a political force a decade ago.

Kelly, Carlson, and Bannon have all criticized Trump before, and they’ve all gotten back in line later. But less than a week in, this war already threatens to drag on for weeks—if not months or, as Trump floated on Monday, “forever.” If it does drag on, it will become even less popular, including among Republicans. Facing sustained criticism from the MAGA faithful who rightly see the war as a “betrayal,” Trump could well spiral into unprecedented territory.

There are historical reasons for believing that Trump will survive this MAGA split largely unscathed. In 2016, much of the intellectual conservative establishment opposed his candidacy and failed miserably in its attempt to stop him. In January of that year, National Review published an entire issue, featuring essays from dozens of conservative figures, some whose criticism of Trump has grown more pointed (notably William Kristol) and many more who have since warmed up to the president, if not become outright admirers (like Ben Domenech and Erick Erickson). It didn’t work—and National Review slowly shifted from Never Trumpism to anti-anti-Trumpism to generally pro-Trumpism, even as he does many of the things they warned about back in 2016.

So yes, Trump has beat back the conservative intelligentsia before. But that’s not really what he’s facing right now. One reason why Trump was able to defeat the eggheads at National Review was by empowering other figures who embraced him. In many cases, these people backfilled the intellectual void in the MAGA movement. Trump was anti-immigration, anti-free trade, and loosely anti-interventionist; people like Bannon and Carlson took those loose parameters and fleshed them out.

Of course, most of the MAGA movement is still whatever Trump says it is. MAGA is Trump—not Carlson or Bannon and certainly not Megyn Kelly or lower-level critics of the Iran War like Matt Walsh, a loudmouth who makes Kelly look like Jurgen Habermas. But Trump’s resilience stems in party from his ability to craft alliances with disparate—and often contradictory—parts of the Republican coalition. His incoherence and stunning lack of command over policy basics made him attractive to both neoconservatives and isolationists. His seeming preference for extremely aggressive but limited military operations abroad—like the assassination of Iranian Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020 or the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, could ostensibly satisfy people in every camp. These were bold, illegal, dangerous moves. But they weren’t accompanied by calls for regime change or the extended deployment of U.S. troops.

Now, Trump has planted a flag firmly in the interventionist camp. This has been a long evolution, one that began with the dropping of the “Mother of All Bombs” in Afghanistan in 2017 and has now peaked with the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the initial strikes on Saturday. We’re now witnessing what may be the beginning of a regional war. Whether U.S. troops will deployed on the ground is anyone’s guess, but this war will hang over Trump’s presidency regardless.

Trump and Netanyahu have made a mess of the entire Middle East in only a few days—Iran is bombing Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and several other Gulf States. The U.S. has instructed hundreds of thousands of civilians to leave the region, even though it has left them to fend from themselves as Iranian bombs fall on airports. It’s still not clear who will emerge to lead Iran in the wake of Khamenei death, nor what type of leader or government would be deemed acceptable to Israel or the United States. As I wrote over the weekend, it seems clear that the two countries prefer vastly different outcomes, with American leaders wanting relative stability—perhaps with a full takeover from the Revolutionary Guard Corps—and Israeli leaders seeking to turn Iran into a failed state. And the CIA’s reported decision on Tuesday to begin arming Iranian Kurds seems designed to jumpstart a civil war.

Trump, it’s worth saying, is doing all of this while he is historically unpopular and his party is facing what may turn out to be the biggest midterm massacre since 2006. But what happens when he is even more unpopular, overseeing a foreign war that’s out of control, and no longer has control of Congress? What happens when the subpoenas and investigations—and yes, impeachments—start? What happens if this becomes a regional war? What happens if U.S. civilians, stranded in a Gulf state, are taken hostage? What happens if U.S. ground forces start aiding one, or several, factions in an Iranian civil war?

These are all plausible scenarios, given the state of play in this very moment: Republicans in Congress are holding on to control by a thread, Trump’s approval rating is plummeting to new depths, and this war is already spinning out of control. The administration has no plan for what comes next; hell, it doesn’t even have a plan for evacuating the hundreds of thousands of U.S. civilians who are stuck in the Middle East. But Trump is also unprepared politically—for the exodus of support from Republican voters and lawmakers alike if this war expands and ground troops are deployed. He says “MAGA is Trump.” Before too long, that may be pretty much all that MAGA is.