The MAGA movement’s top influencers were divided over bombing Iran until President Donald Trump did just that Saturday night.
Now, at least for the time being, the lay leaders in the president’s base appear to be rallying around a position that spares Trump criticism: Direct attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities are justified, as long as American troops aren’t sent into a third full war halfway around the world in the last quarter of a century.
“People don’t want an escalation where ground troops are sent in, but this is not Iraq,” said Ryan Girdusky, a Republican consultant who worked for a super PAC that backed Vice President JD Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio. Girdusky predicted the MAGA base will swing in line behind Trump.
There is little appetite at the White House or anywhere else in Washington for a ground invasion of Iran, a mountainous country in the Middle East that would be extraordinarily difficult to conquer in a conventional war.
But it’s hardly unusual for the start of hostilities — the airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear-enrichment facilities were the first direct American intervention in a week-old war between Israel and Iran — to create a rally-around-the-flag effect within a president’s party. What’s notable is just how dramatic and speedy the turn has been from dissent to full-throated support.
“Heavy smear campaign going on right now attacking America First Patriots as ‘Isolationists,’” Jack Posobiec, a leading voice in the MAGA movement, posted earlier Saturday, before the bombings. “I hope everyone using this bad persuasion knows that it associate them with the worst Bush-era neocons,” slang for the so-called neoconservative rge W. Bush administration officials who pushed for war in Iraq.
Posobiec had previously warned that direct attacks on Iran would “disastrously split the Trump coalition.”
But after the airstrikes, he posted what looked like a sentiment of approval.
“President Trump has clearly signaled, as he has all along, that he opposes a regime change war in Iran,” he wrote. “This is about the nuclear program of Iran which he promised he would end from day one.”