It’s become a stock social media joke to point out that MAGA stands for whatever Donald Trump says it does at any given moment, but now Trump himself has essentially confirmed the point. Faced with a battle among MAGA influencers over his attack on Iran, Trump unleashed a harsh broadside against some of the dissenters.
“THEY ARE NOT MAGA, I AM,” Trump raged on Truth Social, adding that MAGA entails “not allowing Iran, a Sick, Demented, and Violent Terrorist Regime, to have a Nuclear Weapon.”
In short, anyone who dissents from Trump’s war of choice—anyone who points out that the invasion contradicts his longtime promise of “no new wars”—faces potential excommunication from the MAGA movement. The contempt this shows for the aspirations and fears of ordinary voters who happened to pick Trump in 2024—and might have legitimate worries about the Iran war—is basically boundless.
The immediate target of Trump’s fury was podcaster Megyn Kelly, who opposes the war and is feuding with pro-war Fox News host Mark Levin. Kelly and others, like Tucker Carlson and the non-MAGA Andrew Sullivan, oppose the war as doing Israel’s bidding. The battle has gotten vicious, with Kelly deriding Levin as “Micropenis Mark” and pro-war voices like Ben Shapiro slamming Kelly as an “unbelievable coward.” MAGA debates unfold at a lofty level.
This conflict among influencers primarily involves MAGA voices turning against the America-Israel alliance. It seems less focused on the general suspicion of foreign entanglements—and anger at elites who brought us the Forever Wars in the Mideast—that supposedly drive MAGA.
To be sure, those anti-interventionist leanings have long been overhyped. Yet some swaths of MAGA do at times appear to harbor such views. In a bombshell, Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, just resigned his post over the war. Kent, an extremist with vile views, did cite Israel’s influence as a key reason, but he also declared that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” adding: “I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people.”
It’s noteworthy that a MAGA diehard like Kent directly contradicted Trump’s claims about the Iran threat and the benefits of attacking Iran—while warning of exactly the sort of quagmire that Trump supposedly opposes. The way Kent blamed Israel in his letter was certainly ugly; a big motivator of some of these critiques is antisemitism. But we can distinguish between the likes of Kent and Carlson and their followers. Clearly some segments of their audiences genuinely oppose wars of choice.
Trump and his advisers have responded to this by simply writing the “no new wars” pledge out of the MAGA story. In suggesting that critics of the war on Iran “ARE NOT MAGA,” Trump also declared that “MAGA is about stopping them cold” before they get a nuke to “blow up” the United States and “the world.”
Note that this simply erases any debate over whether Iran’s nuclear ambitions actually constituted a dire enough threat to America—and the world—to justify our attack. Trump’s own intelligence officials have privately said they did not, and this now includes Joe Kent saying so publicly, whatever his twisted motivations. But in Trump’s formulation, anyone who harbors doubts about the threat Iran posed is commanded to accept it as a settled question. Because Trump said so.
“President Trump is the leader of MAGA,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt similarly insisted recently. “And there is nothing more ‘America first’ than taking out terrorists.” This again treats it as unassailably true that the war actually does constitute doing what’s urgently needed to combat terrorism. It suggests the only people the war is killing are terrorists, whereas it has likely killed over a thousand Iranian civilians.
But the “leader of MAGA” has decreed that the war is only killing “terrorists.” Being “MAGA” requires robotically accepting this as truth.
That’s just not sustainable. To see why, just look at the gyrations of JD Vance. Asked this week to reconcile his support for Trump’s war with his long-stated suspicions of previous foreign entanglements, Vance said: “One big difference is that we have a smart president, whereas in the past, we’ve had dumb presidents.” Trump, said Vance, will avoid the “mistakes of the past.” Vance has also said: “Now we have a president who knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives” and won’t get sucked into “some long, drawn-out thing.”
Vance’s argument, then, is that the “smart” Trump has defined a precise objective—the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program, as Vance puts it—and is now using overwhelming force to accomplish this immaculately. Trump will get out before falling victim to the sort of quagmire that befell “dumb presidents.”
But this is not faithful to Vance’s previous positions, no matter how hard he tries to make it so.
You cannot overstate how central suspicions of foreign entanglements have been to Vance’s political identity as a champion of working-class heartlanders abandoned by “elites.” Central to this has been the idea that these wars were not worth their cost in lives and treasure, and thus were sold with “lies.”
Vance, for instance, marked the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion with a solemn declaration. “The war killed many innocent Iraqis and Americans,” he said, noting that “it cost over $1 trillion” and thus was an “unforced disaster.”
Now contrast that with Vance’s current stance. He only purports to evaluate Trump’s war based on whether it’s accomplishing a precise aim—disabling Iran’s nuke ambitions. But Trump’s official rationales have lurched in all directions, and what’s missing now is any wrestling with whether the supposed benefits we’re gaining are worth what we’re sacrificing.
They plainly are not. Our own intelligence officials didn’t see Iran’s nuclear program as anything like the threat Trump proclaims. The war cost over $11 billion in its first week. It has killed over a dozen Americans and apparently over a thousand Iranian civilians, many of them children. Vance expressed concern about the Iraqi dead in evaluating that catastrophe. What does he say about Iranian civilians now? What about the financial burdens? What about the global consequences of the choked-off Strait of Hormuz, let alone whatever will be required to reopen it?
Vance—who used to talk about the costs of foreign wars in posing as a kind of Avenger of the Abandoned Heartland—should be pressed to account for all of it.
Then there’s the official lying. As Damon Linker notes, the Iran war echoes many of the broader foreign policy establishment’s previous world-historical errors. The lies, hubris, and folly of the old elites were central to Vance’s case against them. But this war, too, was sold on lies about the Iran threat—and in its catastrophic planning failures, it too has been marked by hubris and folly. What does Vance have to say about all that?
Trumpworld’s redefinition of MAGA is a farce. Not just in the hands of Trump and Leavitt, but also in the hands of Vance, who is recasting it almost as crudely. It’s hard to know what’s more galling—the brazen shamelessness of this effort, or the naked contempt it shows for the voters who are obviously expected to simply roll over and unthinkingly accept it.
