In Feb. 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump blasted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), assuming he'd start World War III. Now, it's Trump that is on board with war after one commentator said Graham led Trump on a leash toward the attacks on Iran.

“He’s one of the dumbest human beings I’ve ever seen… you’ll end up starting World War III with a guy like that," Trump told Fox News.

Writing for Zeteo.com, Prem Thakker alleged that it was Graham who "helped dog-walk him into his disastrous war in Iran — a baseless and illegal conflict that’s pierced the illusion that the president is a dovish exception to the bloodthirsty conservative movement."

Graham has hedged these past few weeks, saying that he wants regime change to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. However, he's also demanded that countries in the region get involved in the effort with the U.S.

“We’re going to blow the hell out of these people,” Graham pledged. “When this regime goes down, we’re going to have a new Mideast,” he fantasized.

He then gave away the game: “We’re going to make a ton of money," he said, explaining that “Venezuela and Iran have 31 percent of the world’s oil reserves.”

Thakker noted that Graham seemed to gleefully brandish a hat reading "Free Cuba," indicating that the president is working his way through the list of nations he appears to want to impact. After his attack on Venezuela, Trump explained that his foreign policy doctrine has been about the Western hemisphere. Then he waged the Iran war.

On Sunday, after Israel bombed several oil facilities, Thakker noted that Graham rushed to Fox cameras to rejoice: “Donald J. Trump saved the world from real chaos… Thank God Trump did this.”

"Graham’s PR role for Trump’s war is all the more interesting given his apparent role in making the war happen," Thakker closed. "The efforts have been as pathetically paternalistic as Graham reportedly playing a word-association game with our man-child president, encouraging him to go to war."

Many of Donald Trump's most outspoken allies were his harshest critics, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and in a recent podcast appearance, conservative political commentator Ana Navarro explained why the president has held such sway over his past enemies.

Once a GOP political operative supporting the likes of John McCain and Jeb Bush, Navarro has emerged as a strident conservative critic of Trump ever since his first campaign for president. On Thursday, she was a guest on the latest episode of The Daily Beast Podcast, where she dug into the "complete 180s" she has seen her conservative acquaintances, like Rubio, do over the course of Trump's political career.

“I have seen person after person who I personally knew and admired and thought were different, do complete 180s,” Navarro told co-host Joanna Coles. “I have known Marco Rubio since he was very young. We’re the same age. We grew up in Republican politics in South Florida. I’ve known Pam Bondi for decades, since she was attorney general of the state of Florida.”

She also singled out Graham, calling him "a completely different person than he was." The reason for each and every one of these changes, she said, was to do with power, and Trump's ability to bring them closer to it.

“So many people in Congress, so many people that are serving in this administration, so many people that I see on TV [are] defending the indefensible and the unjustifiable because it means they have access to power,” Navarro explained. “Let’s be clear, the trappings of power are very attractive. It’s great to be invited to the White House. It’s great to be able to go to the Christmas parties. It’s great to be able to ride on Air Force One and be able to call up the White House and talk to whomever you want. All of those things are heady things. I know; I’ve done them.”

She added later: "But the question is: are you willing to compromise every principle you supposedly stood for, every conviction you supposedly had, every belief you supposedly held in order to stay in that circle of power?"

On Rubio, Navarro specifically noted that he has been able to justify "selling his soul" to Trump because of the things he has accomplished as Secretary of State, including one of his biggest long-term goals, the removal of Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela.

Prior to Trump becoming president the first time around, Rubio ran against him in the 2016 GOP primary, where he called his opponent a "con artist" and warned that voting for him was a "trap." Graham, meanwhile, made the oft-quoted prediction that, "If we nominate Trump [in 2016], we will get destroyed [...] and we will deserve it."

Like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and now-Vice President JD Vance, journalist Sohrab Ahmari went from being an outspoken Donald Trump critic to being an ardent supporter. The Tehran, Iran-born Ahmari, now 41, once identified with neocons, but during Trump's first presidency, he went hardcore MAGA and took an America First turn. And by 2019, Ahmari was clashing with Never Trump conservatives like New York Times columnist David French — who, as he saw it, didn't have what it took to fight back against the progressive agenda.

Ahmari was an early supporter of Trump's 2024 campaign. But in an article published by UnHerd on March 19, Ahmari lays out some reasons why he has turned against him. At the top of the list is Trump's decision to go to war with Iran.

"In 2022," Ahmari recalls, "I published an essay endorsing Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination. The essay raised not a few media eyebrows, including at CNN. Back then, Ron DeSantis mania was in full swing among American conservatives. Endorsing Trump bucked the consensus of the right's consultant class, which sought 'Trumpism without Trump' and had settled on the Florida governor as the best vehicle for it: a populist (sort of) without Trump's baggage and antics. It was notable, too, that my co-author, Matthew Schmitz, and I weren't early MAGA diehards. Not Mike Cernovich or Jack Posobiec or the late Scott Adams, but, for lack of a better word, respectable conservatives with mainstream careers."

In that 2022 article, Ahmari and Schmitz argued, "Only Trump defied the deep state empowered by his Republican predecessors. Only Trump has broken from the disastrous foreign policy championed by the conservative movement."

But in 2026, Ahmari writes, Trump "has abandoned the intuitions and commitments that seemed to set him apart from the post-Nixon Republican mainstream, not least an aversion to wanton bloodshed and destruction."

"Well, here we are: Trump has now launched a broadly unpopular invasion of Iran in conjunction with Israel," Ahmari laments. "And this, in pursuit of vague objectives that shift depending on which Cabinet member you ask and when. The result: an open-ended regional war that has decimated America's military…. triggered the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and sent gas prices spiking back home — the sharpest four-week rise since Hurricane Katrina. An expeditionary force of 2500 Marines is on its way to the Gulf as I write. What Trump reportedly envisioned as a quickie, Venezuela-style affair will thus widen into a prolonged operation with a ground component."

The MAGA journalist continues, "I can't claim to speak for my co-author, but this was exactly the type of scenario I had in mind when, back in 2022, I celebrated Trump for ditching the foreign-policy consensus of conventional conservatism. And lest the hawks and pro-Israel hardliners who now lord it over MAGA attempt gaslighting, the Trump campaign in 2024 listed the plank 'PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE' near the top of its platform…. As president, DeSantis would have been an old-school, donor-beholden hawk. But we are getting the same thing with the second Trump Administration, only with the chaos, messaging confusion, and sheer incompetence characteristic of the multiply-bankrupt ex-developer and reality-TV shouter."

President Donald Trump is expressing “contempt for Congress” by escalating the Iran war without consulting them, according to a recent report.

After Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth held briefings for lawmakers on Tuesday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said they anticipated a lengthy military campaign, according to The Washington Post.

“I think they have contempt for Congress,” Murphy told reporters. “They have no plans to come to Congress for any authorization, even if they were to insert ground forces.”

Murphy was joined by a Republican, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who quoted former Secretary of State and President John Q. Adams on X.

“As yet another preemptive war is begun in the Middle East, John Quincy Adam’s words of wisdom still ring true,” Paul wrote, quoting Adams saying “‘Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.’”

He added that, although he sympathizes with oppressed people from Iran and North Korea to Tibet, he agrees with Adams that America should not go “abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

As the Senate prepares to vote on a resolution to claw back its warmaking power from the president, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said “I pray so hard for my colleagues to exercise the judgment that this is not the right time for more war.”

By contrast, Sen. Todd Young (R-In.) said he will not vote to stop Trump from taking further action against Iran, arguing that “the United States and our allies are now in conflict with a brutal, hostile, and dangerous regime. I believe that danger will only grow if we limit the President’s military options at this critical moment.”

Similarly, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that the Senate “should let [Trump] finish the job. We should cheer him on, in my view.” Indeed, with the exception of Paul, every Republican in the Senate is voting with Young and Graham against the resolution. The only Democrat to also vote against it is Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania.

Because Trump ran for president in 2024 on the claim that he opposed expanding America’s military presence throughout the world, former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois argued last week that the Trump supporters still backing him are proving themselves to be in a “cult.”

“I thought you wanted him to end wars all over the world,” Walsh wrote on his Substack. “You said you wanted him to end American entanglement in conflicts and wars around the world. America shouldn’t be involved in these wars, you said. That’s why you’re voting for Trump, you said.” Then, despite Trump’s actions against Denmark, Venezuela and Iran, they still support him.

Walsh added, “And you don’t like when people call you a cult, Trump voters? What else are people to think when you voted for Trump to get us the hell out of wars around the world, and instead he gets us involved in wars around the world and starts new wars, and you still sing his praises and support him? What are we to think, MAGA, but that you are a cult?”

According to journalist Michael Wolff, who has written extensively about Trump, Trump’s invasion of Iran is about his own ego and not about the national interest.

"His entire foreign policy is focused on that question: ‘Can we get a win? What’s the win?’” Wolff said. “In Trump’s head, it’s always, ‘I can get a win.’”

Describing Trump’s perception of his political career "as essentially a stage set in television," he described the Iran war as a "mini series” in the president’s mind.

"The central casting, there’s only one central person. And that’s Donald Trump,” Wolff concluded. “It’s his war."

Donald Trump is facing renewed backlash from his own MAGA base, with CNN reporting that several prominent voices have rallied around past comments from the late far-right activist Charlie Kirk that conflict with the president's latest military action.

On Saturday, the U.S. military began conducting joint strikes against Iran alongside Israel, marking the start of another major combat operation abroad after Trump pledged on the campaign trail to avoid getting into more foreign wars. In response to this development, several prominent conservatives resurfaced past comments and posts from Kirk — the founder of Turning Point USA, who was killed last fall — in which he voiced specific opposition to U.S. involvement with a conflict in Iran.

As highlighted in a report by CNN, Rob Smith, "an Iraq War veteran and conservative commentator," shared an informal poll Kirk conducted on X last June, in which he asked followers if the U.S. should join "Israel’s war with Iran." Just shy of 90 percent of the 489,000 respondents chose "No."

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former GOP congresswoman and Trump ally-turned-critic, reposted a clip of Kirk from around the same time last year in which he decried the idea of a U.S. war against Iran for the purpose of regime change as "pathologically insane," and criticized the likes of Sen. Lindsey Graham for encouraging the idea. The clip currently has over 2.8 million views.

The Hodgetwins, a conservative comedy group, shared a clip to X in which Vice President J.D. Vance credited Kirk with talking Trump out of a conflict with Iran. Right-wing cleric Calvin Robinson shared the same clip, and including the message, "God bless Charlie Kirk. We are worse off without him."

Laura Loomer, meanwhile, took issue with the use of Kirk's past comments, decrying those who "never miss a beat exploiting his death to say our entire foreign policy has to be dictated by the opinions of Charlie Kirk, who is dead. Of course it’s sad, but Charlie Kirk was wrong about a lot. Just like he was right about a lot."

Loomer, an outspoken anti-Islam advocate, has been noted for her close relationship with Trump and her ability to influence his decision-making process.

"The public feud is a reminder of the uncertainty among many of Trump’s most-engaged online supporters over how to reconcile his repeated pledges to keep the U.S. out of foreign wars with his aggressive actions in Venezuela and Iran," CNN's report explained. "It’s also a sign of Kirk’s enduring influence over Republican politics — an influence that has, in some ways, grown in the six months since a gunman killed him during an event on a Utah college campus."

President Donald Trump, like the previous Republican president George W. Bush, incorrectly claimed that the Middle Eastern country he wished to invade possessed a nuclear weapon. Unlike Bush, however, Trump never even attempted to create a convincing argument as to the nuke’s existence.

“Trump hasn’t presented a scintilla of evidence that Iran represents an imminent nuclear or missile threat to America,” wrote Joseph Cirincione, national security analyst and anti-nuclear activist, wrote on his Substack on Sunday. “He has skipped the laborious process of manipulating the intelligence, presenting false reports and assessments, of trying to convince the American people, the Congress, our allies and the United Nations that there was an urgent necessity to go to war.”

Instead of creating a large body of supposed evidence that could be presented to the public, Cirincione said that Trump relies “on friendly and compliant media to amplify his lies over and over” and a “slavish Republican majority in the House and Senate who parrot his lies and refuse to hold any open hearings on the war or debate an authorization resolution.” The president has even tried to curtail the First Amendment right of the press to critique their activity.

“As part of his effort to consolidate Trump’s authoritarian rule, his Federal Communications Commission Chair Brenden Carr is threatening to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who ‘want us to lose the war’ by reporting stories unfavorable to the administration,” Cirincione wrote. “Trump is also aided by legions of well-funded groups backing the far-right government of Israel who are happy to support a war that they believe will destroy a country they consider the arch-enemy of Israel.”

The anti-nuclear activist also commented that Trump is better serving the agenda of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than he is his own.

“I have been in Washington for over 40 years and I cannot remember a time when Netanyahu did not want to invade Iran,” Cirincione wrote. “His persistence paid off. He finally found an American president so stupid that he would do what every Republican and Democratic president since Ronald Reagan refused to do: start a pointless, enormously costly war with an adversary on the other side of the globe that, however odious, posed only secondary threats to America.”

Ironically, Trump spent months prior to invading Iran (and, before that, Venezuela) demanding that he be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump told Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre earlier in March regarding being snubbed. He later added, “I’m no longer interested in it [the Peace Prize]."

In the words of Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist who advised Bush, characterized Trump’s exchange with Støre as showing Trump has no interest in peace and wishes to wage war.

“No man of violence and venom can resist the siren song of modern warfare, which, after all, is just a game,” Schmidt wrote for his Substack, employing the term “game” sarcastically “This is Trump’s team: Hegseth, Rubio, Vance, Cain, Bondi, Noem, Kushner, Witkoff, Musk, Weiss, Ellison, Hannity, Graham, Patel. Never have so many nitwits commanded so much power. They are a terrifying bunch, to say the least.”

Schmidt concluded by writing “war is no game. Yet, it is treated as such by a group of vile men and women who are playing with human life as if they were gods. Trump is no god. There is no divinity lurking around Trump. There is only blackness. Only death. Only misery. Only wreckage. Only corruption.”

Earlier this month, a former employee for Trump expressed concern that the president will ultimately cause a nuclear war over Iran.

“Few Americans realize how close the president took us to the brink of nuclear war in his first term before aides talked him down,” Miles Taylor, the Department of Homeland Security chief of staff during Trump’s first term, wrote regarding the president’s warmongering against North Korea at that time. “What the public didn’t know at the time — and until years later — was that the president’s team was worried he might start a nuclear war.”

President Donald Trump was not manipulated into the Iran war by Israel, a prominent columnist explained on Wednesday — but it will be difficult to avoid an upsurge in anti-Semitism because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did indeed play a critical role in persuading Trump.

“For those who suspect that Israel manipulated America into war, the resignation of Joe Kent, Donald Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, surely seems like confirmation,” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote on Wednesday. Yet because Kent’s narrative “taps into old antisemitic tropes about occult Jewish control,” it is bound to become potent in American politics.

Of course, Trump’s own bungling of the war effort has not helped matters much.

“This conflict, whose timing and purpose Trump barely bothered to explain to the American people, was probably always going to increase anti-Jewish animosity among Americans, especially when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel gloats that he’s ‘yearned’ for such a war for 40 years,” Goldberg wrote. “But the more it drags on, the more I worry about a full-blown American ‘dolchstoßlegende,’ a modern version of the stab-in-the-back myth that German nationalists used to blame Jews for their humiliation in World War I.”

Goldberg pointed out that this myth will be harder to dispel in the case of the Iran war because officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have bragged about working closely with Netanyahu to persuade Trump.

“Given Israel’s deep involvement in almost every aspect of this war, it takes care and subtlety — both in short supply in our politics — to tease out the difference between reality and conspiracy theory,” Goldberg wrote. Yet she said perhaps the key detail is that Trump was not uniquely influenced by Israel in terms of his warmongering. Trump was just as bellicose during his first term and always seems susceptible to persuasion by strong-willed people around him, not just when it comes to Israel and Iran.

“A major distortion in Kent’s letter is that it presents Trump as a naïve victim of the Israelis rather than an eager collaborator,” Goldberg wrote. “Trump has always been more hawkish than the isolationists in his orbit admit; he ordered more drone strikes in his first two years in office than Barack Obama launched in eight. It wasn’t Netanyahu who made Trump abduct the president of Venezuela, an operation that seems to have both whetted his appetite for foreign adventure and convinced him that war can be easy.”

She added, “This week he boasted that he can ‘take’ Cuba and ‘do anything I want with it.’ Long obsessed with military might and displays of masculine aggression, Trump was enamored of the idea that he could rid the world of the anti-American regimes that bedeviled his predecessors. He went to war in Iran for his ego, not for Israel.”

Nevertheless, Goldberg ominously warned that the anti-Semitism problem in the Republican Party will only get worse from here.

“Kent is slated to appear on [Tucker] Carlson’s show this evening, and then at a gala alongside Candace Owens, one of the most nakedly antisemitic figures in American public life, tomorrow,” Goldberg wrote. “We can expect him to tell them that based on his view from the heights of American power, they were right all along.”

Writing in a piece for The i Paper published Wednesday, U.S. commentator Simon Marks pointed out that the recent resignation of Joe Kent as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center reveals on a deeper level that Trump cannot continue to hold together his MAGA coalition.

"The White House must now regret expending significant political capital last year to drag his nomination across the finishing line," Marks wrote. "On Tuesday, Kent became the most senior figure in Trump’s inner circle to betray the President. In doing so, he spoke for the substantial number of core 'Make America Great Again' and 'America First' supporters who believe that by waging war alongside Israel against Iran, Trump has lost the plot, if not his mind."

Similarly acclaimed historian Timothy Snyder commented that Trump’s inability to hold together his MAGA base on the Iran war jeopardizes his seeming attempts to seize power illegitimately during the 2026 midterm elections.

“Kent never should have been the director of the national counterterrorism center” in the first place, Snyder observed, writing that “he had no qualifications for this position” and indeed had “anti-qualifications,” including his sympathies for Russia and overt hate for Jews. Yet he was chosen because of his staunch MAGA loyalty, and his resignation “signals a certain clash within the pro-Trump elite between people who are out and out antisemites and people who are so-called Christian Zionists.” While the former simply hate Jews and Israel, treating the two as interchangeable, Christian Zionists “think that a war in the Middle East might be a good thing” because it could usher in a Biblical apocalypse.

“If Mr. Trump is going to succeed in breaking the November election in order to stay in power, he’ll have to have around him a tight, cohesive elite that really sincerely believes – for whatever set of bad reasons – that it’s worth sacrificing the republic for this person,” Snyder argued. The schism over the Iran war will make it harder to do.