The Maga movement will see war in Iran as a deep betrayal
“There’s nothing boring about this,” Donald Trump said in the White House on 2 March, before commenting happily on the drapes for his new ballroom. Moments like these make me think that the president doesn’t really know why he has taken the US to war. He seems to drop bombs on a whim. He is exercising power for the sake of it, and cares little for coherence or justification. Any hope for a post-war plan does not seem likely considering the blasé way Trump said that possible “candidates” to replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed because the mission was so successful.
One official has said that the president feels like he’s “on a roll” after Caracas, like an avaricious gambler going bankrupt inside one of the casinos Trump used to own in Atlantic City. Meanwhile, the war is unfolding like a video game riddled with glitches. Trump lacks the impulse control to navigate it effectively.
Usually, you can look to his deputies for some clarity. But the ambiguity from the top means his lieutenants are contorting themselves to justify the bombings. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, has clarified that this was not a “regime-change war, but the regime sure did change”. We were told that the strikes in August 2025 obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons. Now we learn that more strikes are needed to achieve the same result once again. On the war’s first day, Trump listed the Islamic Republic’s attacks on US citizens; in another interview, he suggested the operation was revenge for the regime’s assassination attempts on him during the 2024 presidential campaign. Which is it?
Into this confusion came a revelation that will crack open the Maga movement. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, declared that the real reason the US launched a fresh war in the Middle East was that Israel was going to attack anyway, and therefore the US needed to pre-empt Iran’s retaliation. This was so remarkable because Rubio was effectively admitting that Israel nudged America into a war, and that the US did not have the authority to tell the Israelis to wait – or that it simply chose to go along with their timing. The Maga movement will see this as a deep betrayal, to the extent that it is feasible the main anti-war movement – at least an online version of it – will emerge from the hard right rather than the left.
Remember that America First, which is the dominant ideology on the right of the Maga movement, states that the US should be placed before all other nations, including close allies like Israel. Trump was elected on the promise to deliver an America First administration and only send troops abroad when it directly benefited the US. That’s why the online right was actually quite pleased about the Caracas raid – because they liked the Call of Duty aesthetics and the idea that America had just extracted billions of barrels of oil from a moustached communist dictator. It was short, sharp, full-spectrum US domination. Today, they are watching battered American F-15 jets spinning down through Kuwaiti airspace, and they can’t see how this deployment is serving the national interest. “Something has gone horribly wrong,” fumed Nick Fuentes during a new podcast episode on 2 March. The influencer had an America First hat at his side.
On top of these more rational considerations, the online right is rife with increasingly brazen anti-Semitism. Memories of the 20th century are fading from US culture. Stories in Washington DC about the suspicion and hostility directed towards Jews (and other ethnicities) among some Republican staffers are widespread. Anti-Semitism is not new to the America First movement, of course. But rarely have anti-Semites been this close to power. The America Firsters in Maga already thought the war was a waste of US lives and money. If the perception that Israel manipulated the White House into a war that killed Americans takes hold, then that could be deeply damaging for the US-Israeli relationship.
This is a bipartisan problem for Israel. The destruction of Gaza has already fractured the Democratic Party, overshadowed its 2024 National Convention, and fuelled resentment among younger voters towards the pro-Israel gerontocracy that leads the party.
One polling company suggests that, for the first time since at least 2001, more Americans sympathise with the Palestinians than the Israelis – a figure that is growing dramatically among the young. Gaza is the issue Democratic candidates expect activists to assail them over online. The rise of progressives such as Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been aided by the anger campaigners felt over Joe Biden’s support for Benjamin Netanyahu.
Expect a similar grassroots fervour to take hold within the Republican Party. Trump is losing touch with the movement he conjured through years of television appearances and Twitter posts. On 2 March, he said that he thinks “Maga is me… Maga loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.” That is wishful thinking. Trump still cannot explain why this war is happening, even as it escalates. He looks more comfortable talking about his ballroom drapes. His movement is watching aghast, wondering who they will support next.