According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday, March 19, less than 10 percent of Americans favor using ground forces in President Donald Trump's war against Iran —which so far, has been an air offensive. Yet among Trump's hardcore MAGA base, Trump's Iran war still has plenty of supporters, according to polls. Although the Iran war has some high-profile MAGA opponents — from former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) to ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson to former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent — Trump still has his share of hardcore MAGA voters who trust his judgement.

According to a Politico poll, 81 percent of Trump voters who identify as MAGA "back strikes against Iran."

But in an article published on March 20, Politico's Erin Doherty wonders how much longer the "unwavering trust in the president" among MAGA diehards will last as the Iran war rages on.

According to Doherty, "there are signs" that "Trump's hold on them "could grow tenuous as he intensifies military action" in Iran.

"Trump voters are more split on backing the war if it results in more lives lost," Doherty explains. "The president has called the strikes a success, but America's increasing military build-up in the Middle East has spurred fears that the intervention will involve ground troops and result in a much longer conflict than expected. The war has drawn searing rebukes from prominent anti-interventionist voices within the MAGA movement, including Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, prompted the resignation of a Trump official earlier this week and fueled concerns over rising oil and gas prices ahead of a midterm election set to hinge on the economy…. And yet, Trump has retained deep loyalty from his supporters on one of the most consequential decisions of his second term."

Republican strategist Barrett Marson warns that the Iran war could hurt Trump with GOP voters if it drags on too long.

Marson told Politico, "The president has to be careful. If things turn just a little bad or if during the summer we are still entangled, those voices will not only get louder but there will be more of them. Trump needs to stick to his four to six weeks, which is fast approaching."

Another GOP strategist, Jeff Burton, told Politico, "MAGA is locked in for Trump. The bigger issue isn't about him or even Iran, it's that foreign conflicts expose a real fault line between more hawkish Republicans and a rising isolationist wing. That tension is only going to grow as 2028 gets closer, and it's going to be a defining challenge for whoever tries to take the MAGA mantle."

President Donald Trump's second administration, unlike his first, hasn't had a lot of turnover — as Trump has made a point of surrounding himself with ultra-MAGA loyalists this time. But a far-right MAGA Republican, Joe Kent, sent shockwaves through the administration when, on Tuesday, March 17, he expressed his disdain for the Iran war by abruptly announcing that he was leaving his position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

In his resignation letter, Kent wrote, "I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby…. I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives."

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on March 18, journalist Andrew Egger stresses that the importance of Kent's resignation goes way beyond Kent himself — as it underscores a "revolt against the MAGA establishment." And much of the revolt, according to Egger is coming from younger American First Republicans.

"The more interesting point now is that (Kent) sees political promise in turning on Trump at all," Egger argues. "For a while, it's been clear that Trump — for all the chaos of his administration and for all his explosive hatred of the liberal establishment — now fully embodies a GOP establishment of his own. These days, your median empty-suit Republican congressman is more likely to make embracing Trump his entire personality than actual internet-poisoned true believers of the MAGA base are. Now, we're starting to see the corollary development: shades of MAGA countercultural revolt against that MAGA establishment."

Egger continues, "With a few exceptions — Tucker Carlson being the most obvious —you see this primarily among younger, smaller stars in Trumpworld. If you have a small right-wing following and you're looking to make it a big right-wing following, and most especially if that following is concentrated among young right-wing people, it's no longer the case that backing Trump to the hilt is the only move."

The Bulwark journalist notes that Carrie Prejean Boller, a MAGA influencer who Trump appointed to his Religious Liberty Commission, "tripled her social-media following after provoking Trump into firing her" by "demanding to know if other commissioners thought her anti-Israel positions made her an antisemite."

"There's no reason to believe that the MAGA base broadly opposes Trump's war in Iran; Trump's voters have always been more blandly fine with Trump's wars than the doves in MAGA media would like to believe," Egger adds. "But the anti-war and anti-Israel types, who are disproportionately young, have established a beachhead in the Republican coalition. Joe Kent won't be the last would-be right-wing star to flee Trump in a play for their support."

President Donald Trump “defends the Epstein class” and is taking the entire Republican Party down with him, warned a former Republican lawmaker and ex-staunch Trump supporter on Wednesday.

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Wednesday slammed Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Mark Levin, Laura Loomer and other Republicans for what she called “leading Republicans into the slaughter before the midterms.”

“I never changed,” declared former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on a social media post on the platform X. “Trump and the GOP betrayed their voters and took in the trash we threw out of the party.” Singling out supporters of the Iran war like influencer Laura Loomer, radio host Mark Levin and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Greene said they “are the BEST political consultants the Democrat Party could ever imagine!!!”

Mentioning that Florida Democrats recently won a special election in a Republican district where Trump himself happens to live, Greene added that overall Democrats have flipped 12 state legislative seats in special elections throughout 2025 and 2026. When Greene resigned from Congress to protest Trump and what she claimed was his destruction of the Republican Party, she said that she would not “fight for Trump and the Republican Party that defends the Epstein class, wages pointless foreign wars, and pursues America LAST.”

Earlier this month Greene told CNN’s Pamela Brown that Trump had committed a “complete betrayal” of his MAGA base by going to war with Iran.

"It makes absolutely no sense, Pamela, going into midterm elections," Greene argued. "Let's remove Donald Trump out of it. Let's just put any president in there. Why would an American president lead his political party into the midterms, waging a full-scale major war, completely unprovoked on Iran, on behalf of Israel? And that's the way most Americans see it. They see this is for Israel, not for America."

Greene concluded: "Why would an American president do that, which is forcing gas prices to hike right here going into spring break, where families are going to be driving out of town, going into summer? Declaring and waging a major full-scale war that seems to have no end in sight. That is not de-escalating. It's escalating every single day. And it just doesn't make sense... I went to, I can't even tell you, countless rallies all over the country for President Trump, campaigning for him and Republicans, because we wanted to win. And we said on every single rally stage, no more foreign wars, no more regime change. It's time to put America first, and this is a complete betrayal of those campaign promises."

Greene is not the only MAGA Republican to claim Trump abandoned the values for which he stood during the 2024 election. In February Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told NOTUS that he too is loyal to the values Trump ran on in 2024 rather than what he has done since starting his second term.

“My constituents already know I’m ‘America First,’ I’m not for starting another war,” Massie argued. “I’m not for deficit spending. And I led the charge to expose a bunch of rich and powerful and politically connected men in the Epstein files. Those are the areas that I’ve differed with the president. So where I differed with the president, my constituents understand why I’ve differed with the president.”

Similarly, after Trump invaded Iran in March, right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan admitted that a lot of Trump supporters felt “betrayed” by his flip-flop on the issue of staying out of wars.

“Well, it just seems so insane, based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right?” Rogan argued. “He ran on, ‘No more wars,’ ‘End these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”

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.

Republicans hoping to salvage what’s left of President Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda or do it without the chaos is a fool's errand, according to a scathing new column.

In what some are calling the effective end of Trump’s presidency, Tuesday’s midterm wipeout handed Democrats control of both chambers of Congress and effectively began the GOP’s scramble for a 2028 presidential candidate. With Trump constitutionally barred from another term, Republicans will need to find a new face to the MAGA legacy.

The New Republic’s Matt Ford predicts the party will be tempted to pitch voters on a cleaner version of Trumpism, one that delivers the movement’s goals without the blunders of Trump’s second term. He argues that such a move is doomed from the start.

“Trump’s mistakes were not a deviation from Trumpism; they were Trumpism,” Ford wrote, continuing: “His political movement is, at its core, based on a rejection of knowledge and expertise. As a result, it is inherently self-destructive.”

He referenced Trump’s first term, when GOP veterans could control his worst instincts to an extent, such as in 2019, when Trump threatened to shut the U.S.-Mexico border to all trade, only to back down after advisers warned of the economic fallout. Ford also mentioned how Trump backed off his tariff war threats back then at the urging of his aides.

He also didn’t follow through on his threat to “obliterate” Iran after they shot down an unmanned U.S. drone after being warned of the economic consequences.

He writes that in his second term, those guardrails were gone, with his Cabinet filled with loyalists who won’t dare challenge him, and Ford argued that the result is the Iran war, which has all the hallmarks of another prolonged Middle Eastern conflict that yields no results, along with oil prices hiking up the cost of living.

Voters who hoped Trump would bring down grocery bills instead got sweeping tariffs that he repeatedly claimed foreign governments would pay, when in reality American businesses and consumers foot the bill.

Ford also wrote that the administration’s biggest wins backfired, pointing to January’s raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. He says the success of the raid caused the Trump administration to underestimate Iran, believing it would be another quick victory.

Ford warned that a Republican presidential hopeful who would eventually campaign on keeping the supposedly good parts of Trumpism without the flaws would be lying to voters: “All of this damage flows naturally from an exaltation of ignorance and the demonization of expertise. They will merely be promising easy solutions to make a quick buck and hoping to outrun the harms they cause.”

A psychotherapist with 20 years of experience pointed to a viral family exchange about politics that perfectly illustrates the ways that MAGA has trapped people into loyalty through fear.

Elliott Connie hosts his own show, executive produced by Tiffany Haddish, that deals specifically with solution-focused behavioral therapy practices. It helps people build on what’s already working in their lives and take practical steps toward specific goals, rather than taking a broader approach to analyzing their lives and mental health as a whole.

In a quick video, Connie pointed to the popular video podcast "The Necessary Conversation," where two children have a civil dialogue with their MAGA parents in Oklahoma and discuss their political cognitive dissonance. Earlier in October, cult expert Dr. Steven Hassan spoke with the family.

Connie explained in his video that so much of the MAGA philosophy is contingent on fear "that is used to manipulate the voting public." That fear helps create an identity to manipulate people into loyalty. In the clip, mother Mary Lou Kultgen explains that she's probably voting Republican even though all but one of the issues align with the Democrats. The one issue that doesn't is the fear of boys playing in girls sports.

"So if you're simply just voting on the ideals, then she would vote Democrat," Connie said. "But they have caused her to fear trans athletes. They've caused her to fear boys playing with girls, girls playing with boys. Now, I want to be clear. In all of sports, if you add up all of the trans athletes in sports, it is less than 1/10 of 1 percent."

The other issues important to Kultgen are pulling out of the war in Iran, the release of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation files, universal healthcare and ICE out of communities. But she planned to vote Republican.

"So, clearly the issue of the war, the issue of the Epstein files, these are much bigger issues," Connie said. "But she's hanging her hat on this one thing that the machine of the MAGA cult has convinced her to fear. And that has formed her identity. And now asking her to vote for another candidate is like asking her to go against her identity."

He explained that it's what makes it so difficult to deprogram people in the MAGA world.

"That's why it's so difficult to get people to vote based upon the morals of the candidate and the ideals of the candidate because they've done a really good job of helping them to form their identity as being a part of the party, or in MAGA's case, the cult. You have to realize that this is happening and then work to fight against it," Connie closed.

President Donald Trump’s approval ratings are cratering. Even his Make America Great Again, or MAGA, diehards have reservations.

Anthony Scaramucci, the former White House communications director and SkyBridge Capital founder, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Tuesday that he expects President Donald Trump to be “trounced” in the U.S. midterms and foresees a “civil war” for the Republican Party in its wake.

Scaramucci said America is in the grip of an economic and cultural battle as the two principal parties put forward “two different visions of where the country should go.”

“I think the president’s going to get trounced, by the way, and I think he knows he’s going to get trounced,” he said. The only customer relations survey one can do on the American president is at the midterms, and “people are not happy.”

Trump made promises of affordability, transparency on the Epstein files and an end to forever wars, according to Scaramucci. “He didn’t deliver on any of that stuff, and so there’s a lot of people inside MAGA that are now also breaking from him.”

After his 10 days as White House communications director in 2017, during Trump’s first term, Scaramucci has since turned into a regular critic. He called the Democratic Party’s “disarray” “the best thing that has happened for Donald Trump.”

But if Trump is beaten in the midterms, he said, the Democrats will be eager to get to the bottom of what is happening in the administration, and Congressional investigations will be “the main show.”

As for the Republicans, “I think there’ll be a great intellectual civil war,” he said. “The Republicans are going to have to reconcile where do they want to go.” It’s “no longer the party of Ronald Reagan, certainly not the party of George W. Bush,” he added, but “is it the party of Donald Trump after he leaves the stage?”

Getting away from the MAGA movement will take some time, he said. “There’ll be DNA elements of MAGA in the next presidential candidate for sure,” Scaramucci said.

With several hundred million dollars of Trump’s PAC money looming over the 2028 race, candidates will not want to put too much distance between themselves and him. “So there will be elements of MAGA, but I also think there’ll be a civil war in that party.”

MAGA and the America First faction have already split outside of the White House. Former Trump supporters such as Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene have distanced themselves, accusing the 80-year-old president of betraying the America First agenda.

The Epstein Files and the Iran war have been a sticking point for the America First coalition, which voted for Trump based on his pledge to not start new wars and focus on economic growth.

Cultism expert Dr. Steven Hassan did some work with a MAGA supporter who is dealing with her children who had pushed her away as a result of her worship of President Donald Trump.

Their viral podcast "The Necessary Conversation" has become a kind of guide for those with MAGA family members that they hope to bring out of the world of Trumpism.

In a recent discussion, Chad Kultgen, his sister Haley Popp and their mother Mary Lou Kultgen walked through some of her policy interests this election. She hates what ICE is doing and wants it out of communities. She wants universal healthcare. She also wants the U.S. out of the war in Iran. By all accounts, she sounds like a Bernie Sanders-style Democrat. But she's being persuaded by the GOP over the idea that boys are playing in girls' sports.

One psychiatrist explained that much of this comes from a culture of fear that MAGA has built and continues to enforce through elections.

Dr. Hassan attempted to mediate a conversation between the Kultgen family using tried-and-true methods of reassuring both sides that they clearly love each other.

He walked through his list of characteristics for people who are in a cult. Mary Lou explained that she sleeps a solid nine hours at night and doesn't really think about recruiting to the GOP, so she didn't believe she was in a cult.

Hassan explained that the characteristics are different based on the cult themselves. He talked about people who are obsessed with a particular sports star or musician. They wear the clothing, they attend all the events, they become good friends with others like them in the group, they spend time on message boards and in groups talking about their fandom and it becomes a huge part of their life.

"It's a culture. It's a thing, right? But it's not authoritarian. It's not asking for dependence or obedience," Hassan explained.

"So you could say I'm in a thing. I'm in a thing," the mother agreed.

"There's another graphic in the book. I don't have a handy thing to hold up, but of all of the different influences over Trump and all of the media circles of how it becomes a silo," he continued. "The point for me is that we're living at a time, this is my thing, you'll read about this in the cult of Trump, Mary Lou, of psychological warfare by enemies of America. Russia, China, Iran. And I've studied this stuff."

"So, Iran has Hamas proxy group to do its bad deeds. So there's this whole machinations by billionaire people who have their own power agendas. And for those dictators, democracy is a threat to them. They don't want free speech. They don't want people to they don't want gay rights and trans rights and indigenous rights and women's rights. They want to be in total control. So for us growing up in America that we love though we went and fought the freaking Nazis, of their authoritarianism. And now we're seeing people in power doing the 'sieg heil' and we're seeing and Chad was showing some of the imagery of of Nazism, right?" Hassan said.

He explained that his message is for everyone who cut off family and friends because they went full Trump: it's time to reach out again.

"Just say, 'I miss you.' And if they say, 'Well, you cursed me out, and you didn't invite me to Thanksgiving for three years.' You apologize," he said. 'I know a lot of people [are] like, 'I'm not going to apologize,' but this is my advice. Apologize and just say, 'Listen, I still care about you and let's just work on reestablishing a warm connection, remembering the good days, common ground and let's share perspectives. Something is important to you, share it with me. I'll watch it with you. We'll talk about it. Then my turn, I'll share something with you,'" he said.

In the end, he said, "The truth will come out."

They pivoted to talk about the Trump assassination attempt and whether or not it was real and Hassan was able to pull her over to the understanding that it could have been staged. He said that the real conversation about these issues is in "reality testing" and exploring propaganda with a logical, non-emotional mind.