Warmongers and Kooks

You’re reading the free version of Boiling Frogs. Consider joining as a paid member to get full access to our news, analysis, community comments, and live events.

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of Boiling Frogs. You can read Nick’s full newsletter by becoming a member here.

Tucker Carlson has accused him of being “complicit” in Israel’s bombing campaign. Steve Bannon is spinning dark theories about hawkish saboteurs hoping to subvert and fracture Trump’s coalition. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has gone full flower child, asserting that “every country involved and all over the world can be happy, successful, and rich if we all work together and seek peace and prosperity.”

Trump is plainly annoyed by all of it. At the G7 summit in Canada, he told the press that he no longer pays much attention to Carlson now that he’s not on television. Hours later, he posted on Truth Social, “Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that, ‘IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!’”

Those quotation marks weren’t a grammatical mistake. (For once.) Trump has said many times in the past that Iran can’t be allowed to have nukes, as his press team was eager to remind critics last night. Isolationists who believed he wouldn’t support another Middle Eastern war now find themselves in the same position as business owners who believed he wouldn’t impose steep tariffs or start pulling illegal-immigrant workers off the job. Instead of listening to him and taking him at face value, they heard what they wanted to hear.

Now here we are, with the president momentarily aligned with “warmongers” and “globalists” against the “kooky” postliberals whose revolution he’s supposed to be leading. Monday must have been the first time in 10 years that Greene took sides with some other right-wing figure against Trump.

Cracks are forming in the Republican coalition in real time, before our eyes. What happens next?

Short-term.

In the short-term, as long as Trump is president, nothing happens.

“Ignore Steve Bannon” is usually good advice but never more so than at this moment. Bannon told Carlson in an interview that Trump’s coalition could crumble over this conflict because it’s held together by three commitments—expelling illegal immigrants, repatriating jobs via protectionist trade policies, and, yes, ending “forever wars.” And it’s true, nationalist ideologues  like him do care about that stuff.

Most Republican voters aren’t ideologues, though. Insofar as the right’s rank-and-file feels strongly about any of those three, their feelings would soften quickly and considerably if Donald Trump were to express his opposition to them. What actually holds the president’s coalition together is bottomless loyalty to the man himself and two simple political intuitions: that the right’s enemies should be punished ruthlessly and that government by the right rather than the left is preferable no matter how reprehensibly the right behaves.

Iran is one such enemy to be punished. The right has spent more than 45 years despising that country’s clerical oligarchy, from the hostage crisis of 1979 to the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983 to the war waged by Shiite militias on American troops in Iraq. Iranian fingerprints are on a lot of those Middle Eastern “forever wars” that Tuckerites are screaming about this week. And Iran is also a sworn enemy of Israel, of course, a country with which many right-wingers sympathize for political and religious reasons.

When Trump says that a regime whose leadership preaches “death to America” and is notorious for terrorist attacks beyond its borders can’t be trusted with a nuclear weapon, he’s not just showing common sense. He’s bringing the meaning of “America First” into line with Republican voters’ desire for ruthlessness toward enemies. His presidency, premised as it is on “retribution,” is threatening retribution for Iran. MAGA’s belief that its opponents have it coming, whatever “it” might be, is justified for once.

That’s not a coalition that’s at risk of fracturing. On the contrary, one polling firm that surveyed Trump 2024 voters found overwhelming support for aggressive action against the mullahs. Eighty-three percent support Israel’s attack on Iran and 72 percent would support direct U.S. military action to stop the regime from developing nuclear weapons. Another 73 percent believe that Iran can’t be trusted to honor any diplomatic agreement. “America First” might mean “no new wars” to kooks like Bannon and Tucker Carlson, but they’re vastly outnumbered on the right by warmongers.

What about the 28 percent of Trump voters who don’t support U.S. military action, though? If they abandon the president over his Iran policy then Bannon will have been proved correct. The MAGA coalition would break.

Right—but they won’t abandon him. No matter how grumpy the Tuckerites may sound this week, the White House is forever one culture-war clash with the American left away from bringing them back onside en masse. Populism is a tribal movement that’s mainly concerned with establishing cultural dominance over domestic enemies; if immigration protesters riot in Los Angeles and Trump orders the Marines to mow them down, I promise you that Carlson and Bannon will backburner their objections to the war and rally to the president’s defense.

Even if they’re tempted to think twice about reconciling with him, Elon Musk’s recent experience with Trump will weaken their resolve. Every isolationist “influencer” who’s weeping this week over the fate of Iran’s precious nuclear program watched Elon learn the hard way that everyone else’s influence over the right pales by comparison to the president’s. If Carlson and the rest want to hold onto their audiences, they’ll need to find a way to re-pledge their loyalty. And they will.

In fact, they already have. Remember that Tucker and “Sloppy Steve” have each found themselves on the outs with Trump before, only to eventually worm their way back into his good graces. They’ll never let ideology reduce them to political irrelevance. If worse comes to worst, they’ll blame the yet-to-be-purged remnants of “the deep state” for having tricked our heroic president into doing their bidding yet again and forgive him for the great Iran betrayal.

So ignore the short-term threats about a MAGA crack-up. Focus instead on the long-term political implications of events in Iran.

Long-term.

Depending upon what happens in the next few weeks, either warmongers or kooks might lose meaningful influence over the long-term direction of the post-Trump right.

For doves, the situation is already fraught. Twice in the span of three years, they’ve badly overestimated how well a large authoritarian power would perform in battle against a smaller liberal one. Russia was supposed to roll over Ukraine in a week, showing the little boys of NATO how manly fascists wage war. When that went badly, the Tuckerites started screeching that supplying weapons for Ukraine’s defense would lead to World War III. Three years and a million Russian casualties later, they look like chumps for that prediction too.

Now history is repeating. Last week Carlson worried that the first days of a war with Iran could lead to “thousands” of Americans killed, an economic collapse in the United States, and a world war in which the BRICS nations allied with Tehran to defeat the U.S. In reality, in less than a week Israel has assassinated several important Iranian leaders, established air superiority over the country, and reportedly caused the regime to beg Washington and Tel Aviv to de-escalate. There’s no sign of any other nation entering the conflict except the United States.

America turned away from interventionism because liberal hawks chronically overestimated their side’s strength against the enemy. Isolationist postliberals are now doing the same thing. What happens to the “end endless wars” talking point if Israel not only overwhelms Iran quickly but successfully demolishes the regime’s nuclear threat, possibly with U.S. help? What happens if the tumult in Iran unseats the clerical regime and triggers a popular revolution, bringing a more liberal America-friendly government to power?

That would be a solid “America First” result. Doves would look like fools for having tried so hard to avert it, more so than they already do. Trump would get a boost in popularity from it too, which might lead him to turn more hawkish generally. (“UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” he posted on Truth Social on Tuesday afternoon.) Having just seen proof of concept that interventionism can work, Republicans might revert to their hawkish Cold War roots. Dogmatic isolationism of the sort practiced by Carlson and Bannon might be a nonstarter in the 2028 primary, with GOP voters reasoning that if using force to stop Iran is justifiable on “America First” grounds, using force to stop China must be even more justified.

The goldilocks outcome in Iran is unlikely, though. It’s easier to imagine ways in which things take a turn that gives doves a chance to say, “We told you so.”

Israel and/or the U.S. could fail to destroy Iran’s heavily fortified nuclear enrichment site at Fordow, the chief target in the bombing campaign. Or, in the course of attacking it, they might send uranium particles up into the atmosphere and cause widespread radiation poisoning among Iranians, inadvertently turning the site into the equivalent of a massive “dirty bomb.”

If the regime does fall, it’s anyone’s guess what will replace it or how long it’ll take for a new government to assert itself. Perhaps the country will descend into quasi-anarchy, warlordism, and civil war a la the worst days of the Iraq occupation as rival remnants of the army try to gain control. Would Trump feel obliged in that scenario to intervene somehow to try to restore order? Would Americans be asked to fund another massively expensive nation-building project with no guarantee of results?

Or maybe things will go the other way, with Trump suddenly abandoning his calls for “unconditional surrender” and demanding that Israel halt its offensive so that he can negotiate with Tehran. (Reportedly the Iranians are insisting that the Israelis stand down as a condition of talks.) That might short-circuit the war with Iran’s nuclear program damaged but still intact. What was the point of all this needless suffering? isolationists will demand to know. It’s another Middle Eastern war where the mission wasn’t accomplished. Why wasn’t diplomacy allowed to work to begin with?

If any or all of that happens, the president will scramble to disclaim culpability and start looking for hawkish scapegoats. (Watch out, Mark Levin!) He might feel obliged to atone to isolationists for his mistake by staying out of future conflicts, like China versus Taiwan—another “red-meat retreat” to pacify his most diehard supporters. Trump-loyal isolationists like J.D. Vance who are siding with the president at the moment could get the green light to condemn the Iran war in hindsight as a foolish misadventure orchestrated by “warmongers” who deceived the president.

Any element of the conflict that begins to resemble the Iraq conflict will be treated by doves in 2028 and beyond as proof that only a president who’s staunchly ideologically isolationist can be trusted to successfully resist the military-industrial complex. Not even Donald Trump could do it when push came to shove! If that’s the way right-wingers are thinking about this war in three years, hawks won’t just be discredited; they’ll be treated as enemies who bear blame for the president’s greatest failure. 

The Israel exception.

My best guess on how the standoff between kooks and warmongers is resolved in 2028 is with a tacit agreement between most of them that Israel is special.

The air campaign against Iran has already succeeded well enough that doves won’t plausibly be able to call it a fiasco even if something on the ground goes sideways. And since things do tend to go sideways in war, hawks likely won’t be able to call it an unqualified success by the time it’s over.

In 2028, the shared intuition that any right-wing government is preferable to any left-wing government will force the two camps to reach an understanding that allows both to support the Republican nominee with a vaguely clear conscience. The probable basis of that understanding is that the right can and should agree to disagree on interventions—except with respect to Israel.

“Israel is special” is already a core principle of America’s most influential isolationist. In his first year as a senator, J.D. Vance circulated a memo arguing that military aid for Ukraine and military aid for Israel should be thought of as distinct and dealt with separately in legislation. He presented a number of reasons, but here again the truth lies in simple political intuition. The right is extremely sympathetic to Israel, particularly the evangelical base; Americans admire how it’s outwitted and outfought enemies committed to its destruction for 77 years; and there’s a sense of kinship between the two cultures, in some cases based on Western liberalism and in others based on Judeo-Christian tribal unity against a jihadist threat.

If you’re a mainstream isolationist with your eye on winning a national election, you’re not going to get far in a Republican primary as a critic of Israel. The easy way to navigate that is to present yourself as an opponent of wars except when they involve our close ally, the Jewish state. The defense of Western culture requires a sustained commitment to its security.

A week before the election last year, Vance said of Israel in an interview, “Sometimes we’re going to have overlapping interests, and sometimes we’re going to have distinct interests. And our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.” Compare that to how he sounds today about the threat from the Iranian nuclear program. Vance has come to understand the political limits of dovishness on the Trump-era right. It’s the flip side of progressivism: Instead of Israel being the only country that isn’t allowed to defend itself, it’s the only country that is.

If mainstream doves insist on making an exception to isolationism for Israel, though, more ideological doves will insist on not making an exception for it. Rather the opposite: They’re destined to grow aggressively antagonistic toward the Jewish state.

Some already are aggressively antagonistic. But those who aren’t will move that way as they strain to find ways not to fault Trump for disappointing them so bitterly with this Iran adventure. Blaming Israel is the obvious move: There is a possibility that Benjamin Netanyahu started this conflict against Trump’s wishes and that he did so hoping to drag him in, knowing that Israel can’t achieve its goals without American bombers joining the fight. But even if Trump was gung ho from the start, postliberal kooks won’t be able to resist their impulse to impute culpability to the eternal scapegoat, the supposed source of all wars.

If you think there’s a “horseshoe effect” in American politics now, in other words, give it a few years and you’ll struggle to tell the difference between Rashida Tlaib on the one hand and Marjorie Taylor Greene on the other. (It’s getting harder already.) Perhaps the most likely political outcome of this war, then, is that the right will begin to mirror the left’s divide over Israel, with the young postliberal vanguard increasingly hostile to the Jewish state while the older somewhat more liberal establishment insists on stalwart support. Good luck to J.D. Vance, a man who’s not quite old or young and not quite an interventionist or isolationist, in negotiating that.