Since Donald Trump launched Operation Epic Fury last week, one thing has become clear: the most ardent MAGA media are no longer supporting the president.
Nowhere was this more evident than on War Room, the live program hosted by Steve Bannon, which functions partly as a news broadcast and partly as strategic analysis of developments from the ideological perspective of the movement that elevated president Trump.
Beginning with two days of emergency broadcasts last weekend (28/2 – 1/3), Bannon was joined by a series of his regular guests to provide both neutral military analysis and, increasingly, carefully worded warnings that a prolonged military operation in Iran would be a terrible mistake.
On 1 March, Erik Prince, founder of the well known military company Blackwater, which had been involved in the Iraq campaign, and a regular guest on War Room, repeatedly shook his head sadly while discussing the American bombing attack that, by that point, had decapitated much of Iran’s top leadership, including Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader for the past 36 years.
“I’m not happy about all this,” said Prince.
“I don’t think this was in America’s interest.
A significant tangle of problems, chaos and destruction will erupt in Iran now.”
Bannon, always attentive to the MAGA coalition, appeared particularly concerned.
“If this is going to be a tough road, I mean, this wasn’t promoted in the 2024 campaign.
We will lose support.
We will simply lose support,” he said.
Bannon also expressed concerns that by “doubling and tripling down with the Iranians” and moving military assets from East Asia, the United States is leaving Taiwan extremely exposed, and warned that removing the current regime in Tehran will not be easy.
“All this state apparatus, it’s not a new construct.
It’s an ancient state,” said Bannon.
“The guys running the Islamic Republic are not just bad guys, they are tough and smart bad guys.”
Skepticism, and even outright opposition, has been the dominant view expressed by guests on War Room in the days since the war began.
“I’m as MAGA as it gets, we love President Trump, but there’s nothing wrong with wanting more clarity about why we’re in a position where, I’m not saying we’ve already put ourselves into a forever war position, but certainly, I think, we’re on the brink,” said War Room White House correspondent Natalie Winters this week.
And Brian Glenn, a pro Trump journalist at Real America’s Voice (the streaming and cable channel that broadcasts War Room) and fiancé of former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, told Bannon that he hopes a quick end to the war will allow America to “close the chapter on this whole narrative that we have to stop the Iranian regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
“Let’s just leave it alone, Steve.
I’m done with this nonsense,” added Glenn.
Similar sentiments have been expressed in recent days by other figures in MAGA media such as Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh.
The criticism from this segment of the pro Trump movement is comprehensive, ranging from the lack of clarity about the objective of the military campaign to concerns that the president is abandoning a core campaign promise to avoid involving the United States in foreign wars.
The issue has grown significant enough within the online MAGA community that Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, responded directly and extensively to some members of the coalition who appear hesitant.
What the polls say
However, for now Bannon and his skeptical colleagues are not representative of conservatives and Trump supporters regarding Iran.
Trump appears to have an overwhelming majority of his voters on his side.
A poll by Fox News this week showed that 86% of respondents who voted for him in 2024 say they support the attacks on Iran, while a poll by NBC News found 77% of all Republicans and 90% of self described MAGA Republicans supporting the strikes.
In more traditional conservative media, led by Fox News, coverage and commentary on the war have been largely positive, praising the president’s decisiveness.
For his part, Trump pushed back against some of these critics, especially Kelly and Carlson.
“I think the MAGA movement is Trump, it’s not the other two,” the president told independent journalist Rachael Bade this week.
In an interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC News, Trump emphasized the point further: “Tucker has lost his way. I knew it for a long time, and he is not MAGA.”
On any issue, the most reliable estimate of where Republican voters are heading is where Trump appears to be going. But there have been notable exceptions when opinion leaders in the MAGA universe led rather than followed, showing how the Trump movement sometimes acted first and the president attempted to satisfy his base.
A rift similar to the vaccine divide during the pandemic
At the end of his first term, for example, Trump suddenly appeared to diverge from some of his most fervent supporters on the issue of vaccines. As Americans faced the COVID pandemic, the Trump administration launched Operation Warp Speed in May 2020 to unite government and pharmaceutical industry forces for the rapid development of an effective vaccine.
By the end of 2020, two of the companies that received grants, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna, had vaccines in advanced clinical trials. Before leaving the White House, Trump personally took credit for the success, calling it a “magnificent national achievement” that “used the full power of government, the talent of American scientists and the strength of American industry to save millions of lives around the world.”
However, the reaction of Trump’s most loyal supporters was much stronger within MAGA media, often with Bannon and War Room leading the way by hosting anti vaccine activists. From traditional talk radio to Fox News, suspicion toward COVID vaccines became not simply common but a default position.
By the 2024 elections, skepticism toward vaccines, not only for COVID, but for almost all childhood vaccines, had become a dominant view within the coalition of the GOP. The most well known vaccine critic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., became a major supporter and ally of Trump’s campaign and now leads the Department of Health under Trump.
By last year even Trump himself appeared to express doubts about the very COVID vaccines he helped create. The trajectory of the MAGA movement is long, but it bends toward conspiracy theories and distrust of institutions.
Could Bannon and others in the MAGA universe be warning Trump and his party that the broad support he currently enjoys for the war in Iran from his voters may disappear quickly?
Against the neoconservatives
Already the most natural ally within the MAGA movement opposing the neoconservatives, vice president J.D. Vance, has clearly expressed his initial opposition through background reporting in The New York Times. (“For his part, Mr. Vance, who appeared personally opposed to military strikes, argued that a limited attack was a mistake,” the newspaper reported this week.)
It will be difficult for Trump to distance himself from his own Iran policy if its popularity declines among Republican voters, but it would be much easier for his successor to state, more with regret than anger, that a Vance administration would allow the full implementation of Trump’s foreign policy.
Thus everything depends on many factors and one main one: how the war itself develops from here on.
A successful regime change after roughly a week of bombing with minimal American casualties is certainly unlikely, and the concern expressed in War Room and on the X feed of Tucker Carlson has a substantial factual basis.
But a number of worse scenarios, a bloody civil war in Iran that leaves the United States in a worse position in the region, or the restoration and continuation of the Islamic Republic under new and equally rigid leadership, or even a prolonged military operation requiring more American troops, weapons and material than Trump anticipated, or even small scale terrorist attacks against Americans inside or outside the United States, risk discrediting Trump on this issue in the eyes of his party’s base.
If that happens, the prominent MAGA skeptics will not appear as outliers within their own movement.
They will simply have been ahead of events.
www.bankingnews.gr
Σχόλια αναγνωστών