I AM THAT I AM.
Thus spake God to Moses, instructing him to “say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”
President Donald Trump has been saying something similar lately: I AM MAGA!
Trump’s latest declaration of his MAGA-ness came in a long post on Truth Social defending the Israel-first blowhard Mark Levin, who has gotten into recent spats on social media with conservatives who criticize the war with Iran. Trump wrote:
Those that speak ill of Mark will quickly fall by the wayside, as do the people whose ideas, policies, and footings are not sound. THEY ARE NOT MAGA, I AM, and MAGA includes not allowing Iran, a Sick, Demented, and Violent Terrorist Regime, to have a Nuclear Weapon to blow up the United States of America, the Middle East and, ultimately, the rest of the World. MAGA is about stopping them cold.
Many Trump voters have been surprised to learn that “MAGA is about” war on Iran. To be sure, Trump hasn’t always been rhetorically consistent on matters of war and peace, but in 2016 he distinguished himself in the Republican primary by lambasting the Forever Wars, in particular the one in Iraq. And in the 2020 and 2024 elections he bragged about not starting any new wars in his first term.
“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into,” Trump said in the best line of his inaugural address last January. “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”
Fourteen months later, Trump is proving a warmaker and divider. The MAGA movement and the Republican Party will suffer as a result.
Hogwash, the White House might say. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt last week highlighted polling which showed that upwards of 85 percent of MAGA-identified voters support the strike on Iran. That’s been the standard sort of reply to claims that MAGA is fracturing: Joe Kent, an America First Trump official, may have just resigned in protest of the Iran war, and right-wing influencers like Tucker Carlson may be jumping ship, but MAGA voters remain on board.
Sure, but there are a few problems. First, even MAGA diehards don’t seem terribly gung-ho about striking Iran, whatever they may tell pollsters. At an otherwise raucous Kentucky rally last week, Trump’s announcement that the U.S. had “won” the war met with awkward silence.
No one denies that MAGA has stuck with Trump through numerous political scandals and likely won’t turn against him now (and wouldn’t have if he instead had made a deal, not a war, with Iran). But MAGA-identified voters constitute around only 15 percent of the electorate, so Trump didn’t win the White House on the strength of their support alone. Rather, he also won over traditional Republicans and independents.
The former group is much less supportive of the Iran war than they initially had been of George W. Bush’s military adventures, while the latter group is broadly opposed. Even in the polls that Leavitt shared, a meager 24 to 32 percent of independents said they supported Iran strikes. And according to a soon-to-be-published survey by the Quincy Institute, around a quarter of Trump’s 2024 voters oppose the decision to go to war with Iran.
You don’t need a PhD in political science to know those are bad numbers in our two-party system. And wars tend to get less popular over time.
Worsening the PR challenge, the Iran war is already alienating opinion makers from the Trump administration. The 2024 presidential campaign was called the “podcast bro” election because of the influential role played by anti-establishment voices like Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump. But now, those figures are fed up with Trump, and many of their listeners surely agree.
“It just seems so insane based on what he ran on,” said Joe Rogan on a podcast episode that aired last week. “This is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on ‘no more wars’, ‘end these stupid senseless wars’, and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”
A dip in enthusiasm from traditional Republicans and a substantial loss of support from independents would mean lights out for the GOP in this year’s midterms and in 2028. After all, despite all the talk of a “landslide victory” in 2024, Trump won the popular vote by a smaller margin than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
And let’s not forget: Trump won’t be on the ballot in future elections. Whatever personal connection he’s formed with MAGA voters—and no one can deny it’s a deep and abiding one—won’t matter much after J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio take over.
The next Republican nominee will face significant headwinds if the Iran war turns into a quagmire, as it seems likely to do. Certainly, he will have difficulty convincing voters that opposition to stupid wars is a credible plank of the modern GOP platform. If the war continues for a long while, then the Democrats can recapture the antiwar energy that helped propel Barack Obama to victory in 2008.
Second-order effects of the war won’t help matters either. Inflation—or, more precisely, high prices—was perhaps the main issue that motivated the American people to return Trump to the White House. But Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz, through which flows a fifth of the world’s traded oil, has already sent energy prices soaring and threatens to kick off a global recession. Working-class voters will be most affected, and they’ll blame Trump and punish his party at the polls.
As the Trump administration hurtles toward a political crisis, we’ve seen signs that it will crack down on civil liberties to stifle dissent. This weekend Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, threatened not to renew the licenses of broadcasters based on their coverage of the war.
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And Laura Loomer—an apparent sociopath who regularly whispers in Trump’s ear—claims she’s been informing the president of traitors in his midst. In one post on X, she called for a new “McCarthyism,” referring to the Cold War campaign against suspected communists. In another post, Loomer said she had created a “list” of conservatives, including Carlson, who she alleges are taking money from U.S. adversaries and deserve “jail time.”
Carlson and other major conservative figures have tended to criticize Trump’s hawkish policies without speaking ill of the man himself. But if they start to think Trump is facilitating their political persecution, that could change, and many of their fans will come to see the president in a new, and much darker, light.
Trump, without question, has created one of the most impressive populist movements in political history. But MAGA, to remain a significant force, needs to be a coherent ideological faction, not a personality cult, and it will need to keep independents and traditional Republicans in its coalition. Sadly, much evidence suggests that the project won’t survive the war with Iran.
