The MAGA-in-Crisis Mirage

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

 

As Donald Trump was convening an emergency meeting of his National Security Council to discuss the increasingly urgent developments in the Middle East, Vice President JD Vance was meeting with Republicans on Capitol Hill. When he wasn’t discussing the president’s legislative package in the Senate, he was doing crisis communications work on social media.

 

The vice president’s anguished and inordinately diplomatic communiqué read like a love letter to two feuding parents. He laid out Trump’s rationale for supporting the Israeli mission against Iran’s nuclear facilities, and he reminded the Americans who need reminding of the dozens of times the president has warned that he would take action to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear breakout. “I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue,” Vance explained. “I can assure you that he is only interested in using the American military to accomplish the American people’s goals. Whatever he does, that is his focus.”

 

Who was the vice president beseeching, and with a tone of deference that departs from his pugilistic affect? Likely, the loudest of the MAGA right’s skeptics of the application of U.S. military power and America’s close relationship with Israel. As a constituency, this cohort may be small, but it punches above its weight in the hall of mirrors that is social media. It includes Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, the self-styled “comedian” Dave Smith, and others who fancy themselves the MAGA movement’s lodestars — the denizens of the atomized “alternative” media environment of which Trump has made skillful use over the course of his political career.

 

Vance treated their discomfort over the administration’s support for Israeli action that advances core U.S. strategic interests as an all-hands public relations crisis, and it’s not the first time. The vice president approached the brief falling out between Elon Musk and the president as though it were the Cuban Missile Crisis. He posted tactful and conciliatory messages and engaged in shuttle diplomacy behind the scenes — a degree of care and attention that suggests Vance viewed Elon and his fan club as a pillar of the MAGA coalition. Vance’s considerate custodianship of MAGA’s Israel skeptics is, in that regard, familiar.

 

Whether they share the vice president’s assessment of this moment’s political dangers or they relish the opportunity to expose “cracks” in the MAGA movement, the domestic and international press have leaned into the notion that Trump’s coalition is coming apart at the seams over Israel. To the extent that there is dissent in the MAGA ranks, it is, for now, limited primarily to the movement’s online influencers.

CNN’s Harry Enten cites polling that should lead observers to conclude that hostility to a joint U.S.-Israeli mission targeting Iran’s nuclear sites is an internet-based phenomenon. Not only do a supermajority of all Americans of every political persuasion believe that Iran should never get a fission bomb, a slight plurality of respondents to this poll — including nearly seven in ten self-described Republicans — support strikes on Iran’s nuclear targets.

 

There’s plenty of additional polling that indicates that the president’s voters and the general public would support that sort of operation. This is consistent with past polling, which has found that voters generally apprehend the need to put an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions before they achieve fruition.

 

One survey that is generating outsize attention among those who would seek to “restrain” the United States comes from The Economist/YouGov, which found that only 23 percent of self-identified Republicans (and just 16 percent of all adults) welcome the prospect of joining Israel in its campaign against Iran. Even this survey, however, does not undermine the fact that the modern GOP — with regard to Iran, at least — is a hawkish party. That poll also found that 64 percent of Republicans (among 50 percent of all adults) view Iran as an “enemy” of America. It showed that 70 percent of Republicans (among 61 percent of all adults) see Iran as either an “immediate and serious” or “somewhat serious threat” to U.S. security. It found that two-thirds of Republicans (compared with just 46 percent of adults) favor forcing Iran into compliance via threats, while just 22 percent of American voters (versus 64 percent of adults) would cajole Tehran into a deal through the application of incentives.

 

You wouldn’t know the extent of the consensus on the right over the need to contain Iran (with some disagreement over what form that containment should take) from the GOP’s full-court press to persuade Tucker Carlson of the error of his ways. It’s bizarre given the president’s dismissal of the arguments that wing of his coalition is making. Trump’s reaction demonstrates that he has a better conception of where the power of the presidency — this presidency, in particular — comes from. It is not from the great online hordes whose ceaseless meme bombardments subdue precisely no one. It is from the tens of millions of average Americans, the majority of whom are in no form “based,” who entrusted Trump with the office he occupies.

 

The MAGA right is quick to appeal to the size of Trump’s voter coalition last November, but they don’t seem to have fully internalized the fact that its breadth renders them a mere part of a large and diverse whole. The critics on the right of American power projection, who fancy themselves the conscience of the country, are in desperate need of perspective. Trump himself appears to be trying to impose it on them.

 

By catering to this crowd as though it has considerable influence over the Republican Party’s rank and file, Vance and others are undermining the president’s work — and, in the process, doing Trump, their movement, and even themselves few favors.