Trump’s Base in Uproar Over His Openness to Joining Iran Fight

Tucker Carlson set the trap, and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas walked right into it.

“How many people live in Iran, by the way?” Mr. Carlson, the former Fox News host and a longtime ally of President Trump, asked Mr. Cruz, who has become a stalwart supporter of the president’s evolving approach to the conflict between Iran and Israel.

“I don’t know the population,” Mr. Cruz said.

Then Mr. Carlson went in for the kill: “You don’t know the population of the country you seek to topple?”

The confrontation, 97 seconds of which Mr. Carlson posted on X Tuesday night, quickly racked up tens of millions of views and came to embody a rupture that has burst into view on the right, as Mr. Trump weighs sending American aircraft and weapons to support Israel’s efforts to demolish Iran’s nuclear program.

Such a move would represent a remarkable reversal for Mr. Trump, who just months ago opposed military action while he sought a diplomatic solution — and, according to an increasingly vocal chorus of his critics on the right, a reversal of his long-held promise to steer the nation out of, not into, foreign entanglements.

It’s erupted into a fight over the meaning of the Make America Great Again movement, and whether the most fervent keeper of its flame is Mr. Trump’s original base and the isolationism that animated it or the Republicans who back whatever action he takes in the moment.

Mr. Trump began his second term trying to hold back the push by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel for an assault on Iran’s nuclear program. But after the Israelis launched a major attack on Iranian facilities, nuclear scientists and military leaders last week, Mr. Trump has shown a new openness to deepening the United States’ involvement in the onslaught — potentially by sending American aircraft to help refuel Israeli jets, and by deploying American warplanes and bunker-busting bombs against Iran’s best-protected nuclear site.

For days, longtime Trump allies across the Republican Party, including firebrands like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Stephen K. Bannon and Mr. Carlson, have taken to podcasts, cable television and social media to inveigh loudly against taking such a step, warning that Mr. Trump risks finding himself in a quagmire overseas — and in a fight inside his own party that could end up harming him.

“Trump just fractured his base, I believe he just fractured his base,” the conservative commentator Candace Owens said on her YouTube show on Tuesday, suggesting Mr. Trump had betrayed the anti-neoconservativism ideology that had once united it. “Effectively, MAGA was a declaration of war on neocons, right? On the people who always come up with a reason for us to send our sons and daughters overseas.”

Yet the anger reveals as much about the battle to define the “MAGA” movement and its competing factions as it does about the rift between Mr. Trump and some of his supporters.

“Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA,” Ms. Greene wrote on X on Sunday.

Mr. Trump burst onto the political scene in 2015 with a promise to break with hawkish Republicans and avoid foreign entanglements — he said the following spring that “The world must know we do not go abroad in search of enemies.” But many of the party’s more traditional hawks now consider themselves “MAGA,” too.

“We’re moving into the land of force,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said this week, adding, “Be all in, President Trump, in helping Israel eliminate the nuclear threat. If we need to provide bombs to Israel, provide bombs. If we need to fly planes with Israel, do joint operations.”

Mr. Trump has long had the support of anti-Iran conservatives like Mark Levin, a Fox News host who met with Mr. Trump directly to discuss the matter earlier this month. Mr. Levin, who has feuded with Mr. Carlson, sat for an interview on Tuesday with the longtime Trump ally Sean Hannity, who noted that the president had long opposed the idea of Iran getting a nuclear weapon.

“People that can’t seem to understand that kind of puzzle me,” Mr. Hannity said. “It’s not up for them to decide what Donald Trump’s foreign policy, or how to define the MAGA movement — but it looks like they’re trying to co-opt it.”

“They go on with their bumper stickers, ‘Forever wars, forever wars,’” Mr. Levin said. “Well, guess what? The Israelis are going to put an end to this forever war, and so will Donald Trump.”

A third group of the president’s supporters have focused on what they believe could be irreparable damage to Mr. Trump’s ability to accomplish his domestic priorities if he moves ahead with an attack on Iran.

“A direct strike on Iran right now would disastrously split the Trump coalition,” Jack Posobiec, a right-wing activist, posted on X last week, just hours before Israel launched its surprise attack.

The same day, Charlie Kirk, another right-wing activist, wrote that “This will cause a massive schism in MAGA and potentially disrupt our momentum.”

Mr. Kirk has nevertheless made a point of praising Mr. Trump’s decision-making on the matter — although he and some other Republicans say that they draw the line at any whiff of regime change.

“Regime change in Iran would be a catastrophe,” Mr. Kirk posted on X in response to a post by Nikki Haley, a former United Nations ambassador during Mr. Trump’s first term who ran against him in the last Republican primary. Ms. Haley has also expressed opposition to toppling the Iranian government.

The fight has made strange bedfellows of hardened conservatives and progressives. This week in the House, Representatives Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, a liberal with ambitions of running for president, cosponsored a resolution to require the approval of Congress before the United States can engage in offensive attacks against Iran.

Mr. Trump has not yet made clear what action he will take. But his supporters say that, by assisting Israel, he might be keeping still another oft-made campaign promise: to end wars, instead of starting them.

“I may do it,” Mr. Trump told reporters on the White House lawn on Wednesday. “I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.”

Of course, whatever he chooses will, in his mind, immediately embody the definition of “America First.”

As for Mr. Cruz, he posted his own podcast online on Wednesday morning, in which he denounced Mr. Carlson as “bat-crap crazy” on foreign policy before accusing him of committing what might be the biggest MAGA sin of all: attacking the president.

Mr. Trump “is standing unequivocally with Israel,” Mr. Cruz said in a post after his shouting match with Mr. Carlson, “and so am I.”