Trump’s coalition is splintering over nationalism and Israel.
Since Japan’s surrender in 1945, no major US war has maintained lasting popular support. The typical pattern — seen in conflicts such as Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan — is for presidents to initially enjoy a substantial patriotic surge at the start of war, which gradually dissipates as the cost in blood and treasure mounts.
Not so with Donald Trump’s current war on Iran. This time, voters have skipped the usual period of rally-round-the-flag enthusiasm and gone straight to the part where they wonder why the US has plunged into yet another overseas quagmire. A poll conducted by Yahoo and YouGov earlier this week shows that 55 per cent of the public disapproves of the war, including 90 per cent of Democrats and 62 per cent of Independents.
Among Republicans, disapproval is lower, only 17 per cent. But the partisan polarization of this and other polls is bad news for Trump, since it suggests that even the minority support for the war is simply a matter of brand loyalty.
And Trump’s coalition includes not just Republicans but many independent voters. Among those who voted for Trump in 2024, nearly a quarter (or 24 per cent) disapprove of the war.
Beyond the polling, the war is already causing a massive split in the MAGA movement. Many of the most passionate MAGA figures made the mistake of believing Trump’s claims to want to tear the system down and avoid regime change wars. This cohort of disillusioned Trumpists includes the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and the bigoted crank Candace Owens, as well as avatars of the hard right such as Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Joe Kent (who resigned as director of the US National Counterterrorism Center on Tuesday, citing his opposition to the war).
Conversely and equally ironically, many of those who are now the staunchest pro-war voices were once “Never Trump” skeptics precisely because they thought Trump would never fulfill their dreams of bombing countries like Iran. This group of hawkish Trump fans includes Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, as well as media personalities such as Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin.
The debate between the hawks and nationalists has often been marked more by vitriol than intelligence. For instance, Megyn Kelly complained that the war had been sold by Trump-supporting “Israel firsters like Mark Levin.” This led Levin to respond, with more than a whiff of misogyny, that Kelly was “an emotionally unhinged, lewd, and petulant wreck” and “utterly toxic.” Kelly fired back in kind by nicknaming Levin as “Micropenis Mark.” She added that Levin
thinks he has the monopoly on lewd. He tweets about me obsessively in the crudest, nastiest terms possible. Literally more than some stalkers I’ve had arrested. He doesn’t like it when women like me fight back. [Because] of his micropenis.
Trump, never one to keep himself out of a petty feud, tried to settle the dispute with a Truth Social post defending both Levin and his own MAGA credentials:
Those that speak ill of Mark will quickly fall by the wayside, as do the people whose ideas, policies, and footings are not sound. THEY ARE NOT MAGA, I AM, and MAGA includes not allowing Iran, a Sick, Demented, and Violent Terrorist Regime, to have a Nuclear Weapon to blow up the United States of America, the Middle East and, ultimately, the rest of the World.
Trump’s all-caps insistence that he is MAGA perhaps betrays a realization that he is losing control of his movement.
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
In these dark times, independent journalism is uniquely able to uncover the falsehoods that threaten our republic—and civilians around the world—and shine a bright light on the truth.
The Nation’s experienced team of writers, editors, and fact-checkers understands the scale of what we’re up against and the urgency with which we have to act. That’s why we’re publishing critical reporting and analysis of the war on Iran, ICE violence at home, new forms of voter suppression emerging in the courts, and much more.
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The exchange between Levin and Kelly is as entertaining, but alas as intellectually substantial, as a shouting match between professional wrestlers.
Kelly’s complaint about “Israel Firsters” does point to the troubling nationalism at the heart of the debate. In essence, the Iran War is dividing the GOP into two versions of nationalism. One is the familiar imperialism of hawks like Levin and Graham, who love celebrating American military conquests as proof of manly virility and national strength. The other is the tradition of unilateral nationalism (sometimes mislabelled isolationism) which is sometimes skeptical of military adventures that seem to be at the service of allies.
In the past, unilateral nationalists blamed the United Kingdom for supposedly tricking the US into joining the two World Wars (a theme in the writings of Pat Buchanan). The unilateralist tradition has also had a strong antisemitic strain, as documented in Frank Mintz’s 1985 book The Liberty Lobby and the American Right. As Mintz shows, some elements of the right have consistently scapegoated Jews and Zionists as the source of the two World Wars as well as conflicts in the Middle East. This is the tradition of Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Liberty Lobby. Mintz also documents that there is a more intellectual, serious strain of conservative anti-Zionism based on sympathy for Palestinian suffering as well as objections to Israeli militarism (which is currently sowing so much chaos in the Middle East). This strand of conservatism can be found in writers such as Alfred M. Lilienthal and Freda Utley.
With the Iran War, Israel has again become a contentious topic of debate on the right. The open question is whether the most recent incarnation of unilateral nationalism will follow in the tracks of antisemitic conspiracy theories or the more productive anti-Zionist tradition.
Joe Kent, in both his resignation letter and in a lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson, emphasized that the role of Israel as the main instigator of the war, a claim that is in line with comments made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who then walked them back).
In his resignation letter, Kent wrote, “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” He also suggested, more contentiously, that Israel was responsible not just for the current war but also the 2003 Iraq War.
This led New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg to describe Kent as a conspiracy theorist. She’s right to say that Israel was not directly culpable for the Iraq War—the Bush administration was more than willing to make that calamitous decision without outside assistance—but that doesn’t mean Israel had no influence at all in the run-up to the conflict. While it is true that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon advocated for an attack on Iran rather than Iraq, there were plenty of prominent Israeli politicians (including Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, who would soon return to power) who promoted the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Kent’s conspiracist leanings are more evident in other ways. While he rightly told Carlson that Iran posed no imminent threat, that diplomacy was possible, and that the Israeli government’s goal of regime collapse in Iran was against the interests of the US and its allies, he also raised the possibility that Israel might have played a role in the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. These are unhinged theories. They also serve to exculpate Trump, making the US president the victim of dark, unseen forces.
In truth, Trump is the author of his own disastrous policies. Benjamin Netanyahu has been pushing for an Iran War for decades; Trump is the first president to go along with this mad plan. The culpability lies with Trump agreeing to it.
The problematic elements of Kent’s criticism of the war underscores the necessity of the left making antiwar politics central to its agenda. The Iran War is already shaping up to be an epic catastrophe on the scale of the Iraq War. The public is already opposed to it and will turn more and more against it. Unless the left starts organizing this antiwar sentiment, the danger is that the public will start listening to crank voices such as Joe Kent — or even worse, Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens.
Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.