Tucker Carlson, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, former U.S. President Donald Trump, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio appear on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum, Milwaukee, July 15, 2024. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
(JTA) — If, as Irving Kristol wrote, a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality, then what do you call an “American First” president who is cheering Israel’s attacks on Iran, increasingly claiming credit for them and seemingly leaving the door open to the United States jumping into the fight?
That’s the question upending the MAGA movement this week as several of its most prominent figures — including Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — have raised varying levels of alarm over U.S. support for Israel’s attacks on Iran and the potential of direct U.S. involvement.
That potential seemed to be increasing on Tuesday as Trump held a lengthy Situation Room meeting with top advisors about the Israel-Iran conflict. Ahead of the meeting, multiple people close to the situation told Axios they believed Trump was leaning toward entering the conflict, and in a series of Truth Social posts before going into the meeting, Trump himself signaled that he now saw the conflict, which he public discouraged before its start, as his own.
“We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” he wrote, adding, “Nobody does it better than the good ol’ USA.” He ended the messages with two words: “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”
Earlier this week Trump had already swung back against the isolationists with a social media post urging “somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that, ‘IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!’”
Greene quickly came to Carlson’s defense. “Foreign wars/intervention/regime change put America last, kill innocent people, are making us broke, and will ultimately lead to our destruction,” she posted to X. “That’s not kooky. That’s what millions of Americans voted for. It’s what we believe is America First.”
It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks, Trump told The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer: Only he gets a say in what qualifies as “America First.”
“Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that,” Trump reportedly said. “For those people who say they want peace — you can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon. So for all of those wonderful people who don’t want to do anything about Iran having a nuclear weapon — that’s not peace.”
However ahistorical Trump’s claims of authorship, the president unquestionably reinvigorated the term and brought it back into the political mainstream. But that isn’t dissuading or deterring the likes of Carlson, a fan of Henry Ford, the most prominent early leader of the America First Committee that staunchly opposed the entry of the United States into World War II. (Ford was later joined on the committee by Charles Lindbergh.)
Shortly after Israel launched its first wave of attacks on Iran, Carlson took to X to frame the battle between the “warmongers and peacemakers.” “Who are the warmongers?” Carlson posted. “They would include anyone who’s calling Donald Trump today to demand air strikes and other direct US military involvement in a war with Iran. On that list: Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rupert Murdoch, Ike Perlmutter and Miriam Adelson. At some point they will all have to answer for this, but you should know their names now.”
In his newsletter on Friday he accused Trump of being “complicit” in Israel’s “act of war.”
Then this week he kept up his criticisms on Bannon’s podcast, saying: “The point is, if you think that saying, ‘Hey, let’s focus on my country, where I was born, where my family’s been for hundreds of years, that was the promise of the last election, please do it,’ if you think that’s hate, you know, you’ve really lost perspective, I guess, is what I would say.”
“Anyway,” Carlson added, I think it’s going to happen. Who cares what I think.”
“You think we’re going to join in the offensive combat [operation]?” Bannon asked.
“Yes, I do,” Carlson replied. “I do.”
“Well, we have to – we can’t – we have to stop that,” Bannon said.
Far-right Trump supporter Laura Loomer was having none of it. She urged followers to “take screenshots of every single right winger who is shit talking Trump right now.” In a separate post Monday, she asked: “Can we stop pretending like @TuckerCarlson is a true Trump supporter?” she wrote on X Monday.
Loomer had seemingly previously found herself on the opposite side of the Trump World foreign policy debate, when she reportedly convinced the president to order then-National Security Adviser Michael Waltz to fire a half-dozen aides. While Loomer’s motives were unclear, and her stated priority tends to be loyalty, the firings were seen as a blow to those favoring a more hawkish Trump administration foreign policy, including on Iran. Waltz himself later found himself pushed out of his White House job, with some reports suggesting that one factor was Trump’s discomfort at learning of coordination between Waltz and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu on potential military options to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a loud and long critic of U.S. wars in the Middle East, found herself dragged into the fight, as reporters peppered Trump aboard Air Force Once about her opening remarks at a House Intelligence Committee hearing in late March. Gabbard testified that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
“I don’t care what she said,” Trump said. “I think they were very close to having.”
For her part, Gabbard — a darling of the anti-war MAGA crowd — was quoted this week as saying that she and Trump are “on the same page” on the topic of Iran’s nuclear weapons timeline. “President Trump was saying the same thing that I said in my annual threat assessment back in March. Unfortunately too many people in the media don’t care to actually read what I said.”
In the same opening statement in March, Gabbard said U.S. intelligence agencies would continue to monitor the situation, while noting the “erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran of discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear-weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus.” She also testified that Iran’s enriched uranium was “at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
As the possibility of U.S. intervention appeared to grow on Tuesday, some sought to consider how U.S. intervention in Iran could be squared with an America First outlook after all.
“If you imagine the basic Benjamin Netanyahu pitch to the White House — in effect, Let us have a go at the Iranians, and you can decide whether to explicitly support us once you see the outcome — it’s easy to see how Trump might decide that an ‘America First,’ national interest-based foreign policy is compatible with letting the Israelis try to settle all accounts,” wrote the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.
And Vice President J.D. Vance — an avatar of the isolationist wing — directly addressed burgeoning criticism of Trump in a lengthy post about “the Iran issue” on X. Without mentioning Israel at all, Vance argued that Iran’s nuclear ambitions and unwillingness to negotiate represented a pressing foreign policy priority.
“The president has shown remarkable restraint in keeping our military’s focus on protecting our troops and protecting our citizens,” Vance wrote. “He may decide he needs to take further action to end Iranian enrichment. That decision ultimately belongs to the president.”
He added, “Of course, people are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy. But I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue.”
