'Canaries in the coal mine': Trump 'catching up with his own base' as MAGA media revolts
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"War Room" host Steve Bannon at the 2025 Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to go to war with Iran is triggering heated debates in right-wing media. While former Fox News host Tucker Carlson — like ex-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) — considers Trump's military strikes against Iran a betrayal of his American First platform, current Fox News hosts Mark Levin and Sean Hannity are applauding the president's foreign policy.
The Dispatch's Michael Warren examines this right-wing media infighting in an article published on March 6.
"Since Donald Trump launched Operation Epic Fury last week," Warren explains, "one thing has been clear: The most MAGA of MAGA media are not behind the president. Nowhere else has this been more apparent than on 'War Room,' the live program hosted by Steve Bannon that is part news analysis, part on-air strategy session for the new right. Starting with two days of emergency broadcasts over the weekend, Bannon has been joined by his series of regular guests to provide both neutral military analysis and, increasingly, carefully couched warnings that an extended military operation in Iran would be a terrible mistake…. Bannon, always with an eye toward the MAGA coalition, sounded particularly worried."
On "War Room," Blackwater founder Erik Prince lamented, "I don't think this was in America's interest. It's going to uncork a significant can of worms and chaos and destruction in Iran now."
Warren points out that "Bannon and his fellow skeptics are hardly representative of conservatives and Trump supporters on the Iran question."
"On any given issue," according to Warren, "the most reliable bet on where Republican voters are headed is wherever Trump seems to be going. But there have been notable exceptions, when the opinionmakers of the MAGA-verse have been leading, not lagging, indicators of how Trump’s populist movement was taking matters into its own hands — and leaving the president himself catching up with his own base.
But the more MAGA right-wing media figures are, the reporter stresses, the more likely they are to be questioning or outright opposing Trump's Iran policy.
"The arc of MAGA history is long, but it bends toward conspiracy theories and distrust of institutions," Warren writes. "Could Bannon and others in the MAGA universe be the proverbial canaries in the coal mine warning Trump and his party that the broad support he's getting for the Iran war from his voters may evaporate quickly?.... But a whole range of suboptimal results — a bloody civil war in Iran that leaves the United States in a worse position in the region, say, or a restoration and continuation of the Islamic Republic under new and just-as-recalcitrant leadership, or perhaps a drawn-out military campaign that requires more use of American military personnel, weapons, and materiel than Trump had ever anticipated, or even small-scale terrorist attacks on Americans at home or abroad — risks discrediting Trump on this issue with his party's base."
Warren adds, "If so, the MAGA skeptics won't look like outliers within their own movement. They'll just have been ahead of the curve."