Epic Fury in the MAGA-verse Over Iran
Many in the MAGA-verse feel betrayed.
Opinion within the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement that makes up U.S. President Donald Trump’s political base was already divided over attacking Iran in the run-up to the war, but Monday’s revelations that Israel drove the Trump administration’s decision to join the military operation have only inflamed those who are opposed.
“Our government’s job is not to look out for Iran or Israel. It’s to look out for us,” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly recently said. “This war is clearly Israel’s war.”
“We voted for America First and ZERO wars,” posted Marjorie Taylor Greene, the onetime Trump loyalist and former Republican representative, on X. “War with Iran is AMERICA LAST … And now Americans are once again coming home in flag draped coffins from another stupid pointless foreign war for foreign regime change on behalf of Israel.”
“This is not what we thought MAGA was supposed to be,” Greene wrote.
Echoing that sentiment, former Infowars host and Rumble livestreamer Owen Shroyer said: “I cannot believe what I just heard from Donald Trump. I feel beyond betrayed. I feel beyond deceived.”
“As Americans, the freedom of Iranians is not our responsibility,” wrote Matt Walsh of the pro-Trump Daily Wire. “If a single American life is lost in the service of that goal, it will be a travesty.”
“No, sorry, I don’t think regime change suddenly became good policy or politics just because Donald Trump did it,” the pro-Trump pollster Rich Baris posted on X.
Trump’s “core appeal” was an “anti-globalist, anti-imperial” message, Curt Mills, the executive director of the pro-Trump American Conservative magazine, told Vanity Fair. But now, he said, the administration “serves rich people and does wars for foreign countries. It plays so ruthlessly into the Democrats’ oligarchy messaging. It seems served up on a fucking platter.”
Regime change in Iran is “a complete betrayal of what this entire movement is about,” said the far-right podcaster Nick Fuentes. “What does this administration do other than cover up the Epstein files, embezzle money through government contracts and bring us to war for Israel?” he asked.
Laura Loomer occupies a unique place in this story. The self-described chief loyalty enforcer for Trump has been hell-bent on purging people she considers neoconservatives from the Trump administration. As The New York Times reported last year, Loomer has launched a crusade against White House staffers she deems “too hawkish, too eager to commit American troops around the world and fundamentally at odds with Mr. Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy.” Loomer has influence over Trump: Immediately after an Oval Office meeting with her last spring, the president fired six National Security Council officials.
You might therefore expect Loomer to be against the Iran war, but she is not. Before it started, she said she was “not against bombing Iran — I personally think we should be standing with the Iranian people.” She added that “if the president decides to stage an attack, well, I’m going to support the president, right?”
“3 US Service members have been killed in action as part of Operation Epic Fury,” Loomer wrote. “American heroes. God bless them and their families.” (The number has since gone up to six.)
“This bitch is celebrating the death of American military members and thanking their families for their blood sacrifice,” Marjorie Taylor Greene thundered in a quote-tweet. “But this is who Trump takes late night calls from and laps up her praise and worship.”
Loomer embodies MAGA’s contradictions: an enforcer for Trump’s America First brand who casts out hawkish heretics yet supports a hawkish war, because it’s Trump’s war — and because of her staunchly pro-Israel stance and anti-Muslim bigotry. “Now it’s time to round up the Muslims before it’s too late,” she recently posted. “Rid the world of all Islamic oppression!”
The intra-MAGA uproar over the Iran war raises a fundamental question: Is MAGA about actual principles (like opposition to regime-change wars) or is it just whatever Trump says it is?
Trump has made his own view on this question clear. “MAGA loves everything I do. MAGA is me,” he told NBC News in January.
But as the Iran war unfolds, and more opposition to it grows within MAGA’s ranks, we shall see if the president is right about that.