On Iran, It's Trump vs. MAGA

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-06-18-on-iran-its-trump-vs-maga/



Donald Trump is besieged on several fronts. His Ukraine policy has failed, as has his alliance with Putin and his foray against China. His tariff bluffs are backfiring, making it hard for U.S. manufacturers, importers, and consumers to plan. His executive excesses are mostly being overturned by the courts. After making a commitment to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to spare farmworkers from ICE raids, later extended to hotel and restaurant workers other than suspected criminals, Trump impulsively reversed course and directed ICE to double down on arrests. And his Big Beautiful Bill has fractured his Republican allies in Congress.

Trump’s approval ratings are now deeply underwater. As Trump becomes more unpopular, he becomes more reckless. But his impulsive shift, from trying to contain Israel’s all-out war on Iran last week, to hankering to join it this week, is dividing his party MAGA base like nothing else. Polls show the vast majority of Americans want the U.S. to stay out of the war. A new YouGov poll released Tuesday found that only 23 percent of Republicans say the U.S. should be involved in the conflict between Iran and Israel, while 51 percent want the country to stay out. Just 16 percent of all Americans support U.S. involvement, while 60 percent are opposed. The majority of Republicans—61 percent—support negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia wrote in an extensive post on X, “Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA. Wishing for murder of innocent people is disgusting. We are sick and tired of foreign wars. All of them.” And this brings me to my old pal Steve Bannon. He has already done one service for Trump and the country by helping escalate the feud between Trump and Elon Musk, which ended with Musk’s ignominious exit. And while Bannon remains close to Trump as a trusted back-channel adviser, Bannon has gone public with his scathing critique of Israel’s Iran war and Trump’s impulse to join it.



Speaking on Tucker Carlson’s podcast Monday, Bannon said, “Who are the warmongers? They would include anyone who’s calling Donald Trump today to demand airstrikes and other direct U.S. military involvement in a war with Iran.” Bannon, as much as anyone, was Trump’s tutor in the run-up to the first Trump victory in 2016. Bannon had a cogent theory of how to connect economic nationalism and isolationism to racist nationalism. As he told me in the too-candid August 2017 phone call that led to his firing from the White House, “The Democrats—the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

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[newdeal2]

1. May it lead to his swift downfall

[lame54]

2. They'll still buy his new phones

[WarGamer]

3. Trump vs MAGA vs Neocons