To read the mainstream news today, or to dip into the, shall we say, eccentric world of alt-right social media, one would think that the war in Iran has created a major fissure within the MAGA movement. Both the polling and the word on the street put the lie to this notion.
Take a Washington Post headline from this week that blared, “Vance Is In A Bind, Supporting A War That Could Cost Him Politically.” Pretty stern stuff, except that the very same day a new poll from L&V showed that 83% of Republicans support the war, only 9% oppose.
The same poll asked who GOP voters trusted more on the Iran conflict, President Donald Trump or the podcasters Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly who have been leading the isolationist charge. This was even more decisive, 83% to 6% in favor of the president.
Another poll, from Politico, focused directly on MAGA Republicans, the ones we are given to understand are starting to revolt. The result was that 81% support the Iran strikes, only 2%, presumably mostly podcasters, oppose them.
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It is easy to see why the liberals in legacy media and the relatively few anti-war conservative podcasters are licking their chops here. It does feel like Trump has broken a promise, and he can no longer claim to have started new wars. But Iraq this is not.
Let’s all catch a breath here, three weeks does not a “forever war” make.
If, six months from now, we are in an unpopular boots-on-the-ground quagmire in Iran, such as George W. Bush found himself in 20 years ago, then things might change. But right now, every indication is that Republicans are lined up behind their president.
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In part, this is because, unlike in Iraq, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who learned the lessons of that mess personally, has laid out four clear goals for this operation, all of them achievable in relatively short order.
These are:
To deny Iran a nuclear capability
To debilitate Iran’s long range missile capability
To destroy Iran’s navy
To disrupt its ability to fund proxy terror groups.
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Even though these goals have been repeated again and again by almost every official in the administration, the liberal media and alt-right podcasters simply refuse to hear them, insisting this a war with no clear goal.
Further gas was poured on the false flames of widespread MAGA discontent last week with the resignation of Joe Kent as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, where he worked for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who is famously anti-war.
It was telling that no sooner had Kent resigned than he was making the rounds of the right-wing anti-war podcasts, and perhaps more telling that he was immediately included in the lineup for a Steve Bannon-backed anti-Israel Catholic Conference in Washington, mostly made up of recent converts.
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The anti-Israel, pro-isolationist wing of MAGA isn’t new. I saw all of these people from Kent to Bannon to the podcasters hanging out at CPAC parties four or five years ago. The point is that, at least on this issue, they have little sway among actual MAGA voters.
But, you ask, how can this be? All of these podcasts have millions and millions of clicks, but nobody actually knows what a click is, or if they are coming in their hundreds of thousands from foreign information operation bot farms.
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Here is a question: If there are so many conservatives furious over the Iran conflict, where are they in real life? Why aren’t they marching in the streets? Why aren’t they filling convention halls? Why don’t I meet them in diners?
I posit, as do the polls, that it’s because very few of them actually exist.
My conversations with voters on the ground don’t always match up with polling, but in this case, they do. MAGA voters, even those who were opposed to an attack prior to Operation Epic Fury, trust not only Trump’s motives, but his ability to contain and end this conflict.
As the great social commentator Chuck D of Public Enemy once famously put it, “Don’t believe the hype.” The MAGA movement is squarely in Trump’s corner on the Iran conflict, and Trump has plenty of runway to achieve his war goals, end the conflict and prove his doubters, yet again, to be wrong.
