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.

President Donald Trump likes to boast about his supposedly unanimous support within his own base, but a recent editorial from a prominent financial publication suggested his movement is not just slipping away from him. It’s eviscerating itself.

"The 'Make America Great Again' (MAGA) 'manosphere' is showing signs of internal fractures, as disagreements over U.S. President Donald Trump's handling of the Epstein files and the war in Iran spill into the open,” wrote the Money Control World Desk in an editorial published on Wednesday. As they pointed out, the so-called “manosphere” that fueled the MAGA movement

Trump launched with his 2016 presidential campaign is fracturing over the war in Iran and his longtime friendship with late convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

"Prominent figures linked to the space include Andrew Tate, Ben Shapiro and Nick Fuentes, many of whom are now at odds over issues such as U.S.-Israel ties and the Epstein files,” Money Control World Desk wrote.

Even President Trump has been drawn into the fierce feud, which threatens to even further dampen enthusiasm that the Republican leader desperately needs as his party approaches the treacherous 2026 midterm elections.

"The tensions escalated after Trump lashed out at both commentators,” Money Control World Desk reported. “'They have one thing in common, low IQs,' he said. 'They're stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too.'"

As war blooms, others in the movement are taking sides. Podcaster Joe Rogan described Trump’s ICE agents as engaged in “Gestapo tactics,” said he was disappointed in Trump’s evasive response to releasing Epstein’s files and opposes his war in Iran. Far-right commentator Alex Jones went from being one of Trump’s staunchest supporters to claiming he has betrayed his base with the Iran war and even questioning his mental fitness. Nick Fuentes, a far right commentator, proclaimed that “MAGA is dead,” and told the president: “Trump, you don’t have any young fans anymore.” Because of Trump’s recent comparison of himself with Jesus Christ and feuding with Pope Leo XIV, many Christian conservatives are even questioning whether Trump is the Antichrist.

Trump is equally controversial among his base on economic issues. "The White House promised a manufacturing renaissance,” wrote Fortune business editor Nick Lichtenberg on Tuesday. “Instead, the factory floor keeps shrinking."

In particular, Lichtnenberg pointed out that "the blue-collar job market has been slowing for more than a year, with jobs in manufacturing and construction racking up roughly 150,000 net losses on an annual basis as of March… During Trump's first year back in the White House, the manufacturing sector alone shed 108,000 jobs — even as the administration touted a coming 'manufacturing boom.'"

He concluded with irony that "the same working-class men the MAGA economy promised to rescue are sitting out a hiring boom in the fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. economy because those jobs are considered women's work. Meanwhile, the factories they're waiting to return to keep shedding workers."

In an interview with NBC News in January 2026, Donald Trump said: “Maga is me. Maga loves everything I do.” Until recently, this statement was true. But over the past several months, cracks have begun to appear in the loyalty of the US president’s “Make America Great Again” base.

President Donald Trump’s prosecution of the Iran war reveals that he does not understand his own voters, revealed an expert on Arab American affairs.

Dr. James J. Zogby, president of a non-profit advocacy group called the Arab American Institute, reached this conclusion in a Monday post analyzing multiple polls. Zogby’s brother is famous pollster John Zogby, and Zogby’s Arab American Institute advocates for Arab American rights. (Iran, though majority Muslim like millions of Arabs, is predominantly ethnically Persian.)

“With the apparent collapse of the US talks with Iran, President Donald Trump finds himself in a box with no easy way out,” Zogby wrote. “Polls are showing that key elements of his winning electoral coalition are growing weary of the war and frustrated with its domestic consequences. As we approach the midterm elections, Republicans in Congress are also nervous about how voters may react when they go to the polls.”

Zogby proceeded to break down the “Republican-related groups” clashing with each other over the war. There are religious conservatives, anti-war voters and “the diverse collection of voters who have hitched their hopes to President Trump’s success” over economic and other practical issues. Because of his unpopular policies involving surprise wars against Venezuela and Iran, cuts to popular social programs like Medicare and food benefits and his overall failure to lower prices, “the President is in a box with no good way out. He is being pressured by his base and Republicans running for office in competitive districts to find a way to end this war before more voters turn against them, while at the same time he is being urged by his regional allies not to walk away and leaving a mess in his wake. The choice he makes will be fateful.”

As Trump’s standing continues to flag among his base voters, some conservatives believe the inflicting of “real pain” due to undeniable Trump policies like his tariffs, wars and spending cuts will turn many in the MAGA movement against him.

“The best case scenario economically is where we're at now, which is real pain for people to experience,” conservative commentator Tim Miller of The Bulwark told his colleagues Jonathan V. Last and Sam Stein in March. “I don't think that 90% of the MAGA folks are going to stay with them. I really don't. It's hard to tell in the polls right now because there's a lag.”

Later Miller added, “Yes, self-described MAGA folks, 90% of them are supportive of Iran, but that's just people who are self-described MAGA folks. I mean, how many people in those polls don't self-define as MAGA folks anymore because of what's happening? As we are sitting here, literally as we are sitting here, the Marquette University law poll, which is like the gold standard in Wisconsin, they put out a poll today. Trump's net approval rating is minus 14%. which is, ‘the lowest net approval figure for him in both of his terms as president.’ I mean, these numbers are, who knows? They're catastrophic.”

When asked about growing criticisms of Trump’s war against Iran and its impact on the economy (such as Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, causing gas prices to go up), two White House spokespeople told AlterNet the American people will ultimately support the president’s policies.

“President Trump has been clear about short-term disruptions as a result of Operation Epic Fury, and the Administration went into this military engagement with a plan to mitigate these disruptions to America’s long-term economic resurgence," Kush Desai told AlterNet last week. "As energy markets begin to stabilize, historic tax refund checks hit the mail, and the rest of the Trump administration’s pro-growth agenda continues taking effect, Americans can rest assured that the best is yet to come.”

Similarly Taylor Rogers said that “the United States’ energy dominance status, as the world’s leading producer and a top exporter of oil and natural gas, has positioned us to not rely on the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz like other countries. If anything, Operation Epic Fury actually underscored the importance of producing reliable, affordable, and secure energy here at home. Many of our allies that have tried transitioning to intermittent and unreliable renewable energy sources have predictably failed to break their reliance on foreign oil that goes through the Strait."

She added, "Several countries from around the world are now looking to emulate the President’s energy dominance agenda and are advancing new partnerships that enhance their energy security with the United States.”

President Donald Trump's failed assassination attempt at a 2024 campaign rally has been widely credited with helping get him reelected, but as his second term begins to anger voters en masse, he has become "vulnerable to his own weapon" as MAGA acolytes begin spreading conspiracy theories that it was staged, according to MS NOW.

A gunman opened fire at Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, at a rally in July 2024, missing him and killing an audience member behind him. In the ensuing months and years since then, the president has extracted considerable political capital from the imagery of that event, but that win may now be turning into a poison pill as his own ardent supporters begin to doubt the official narrative of the shooting and accuse Trump of staging the incident for political gain.

As MS NOW's Zeeshan Aleem noted in a piece from Tuesday, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Trump ally-turned-critic and avid conspiracy theorist, has become the latest and perhaps biggest MAGA-aligned name to question the assassination narrative, sharing multiple social media posts promoting the theory over the weekend. The ex-congresswoman accused Trump of covering up information about the shooter, Thomas Crooks, suggesting that he acted "in concert with others who have yet to be identified," and further asking "why Trump has failed to [crack] down on them."

"Greene is, of course, a seasoned conspiracy theorist, so her posts aren’t exactly surprising," Aleem explained. "But what’s striking is how she’s advancing a trend: right-wing critics of Trump floating unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the Butler assassination attempt — sometimes suggesting that Trump himself may have staged the event. As Trump alienates elements of his right-wing base, he’s at risk of being engulfed by the kind of conspiratorial worldview he once commanded to his own advantage."

Besides Greene, Aleem highlighted Tim Dillon, a comedian and podcaster who has supported Trump in the past, who, earlier this month, said, "I think [Trump] should admit" he staged the assassination attempt. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, meanwhile, said in November that the FBI "lied" about Crooks' "online footprint."

"The subtext of the staged assassination conspiracy theories is also significant," Aleem argued. "Its proponents are effectively pushing a narrative of Trump as a showman who values the spectacle of martyrdom over actually getting things done. It’s basically a conspiracy theorist’s way of saying, 'Maybe Trump is a bulls–t artist.' That’s not a good place for Trump to be with his base — and there’s no obvious way for him to wrest back control of the narrative."

He concluded: "It’s not a coincidence that Greene, Dillon, [Joe] Kent and Carlson have all criticized Trump over his war in Iranall criticized Trump over his war in Iran, nor is it a coincidence that they are all turning to conspiracies to help explain their declining esteem for Trump. The more Trump doesn’t follow through on his MAGA promises, the more he resembles an establishment politician, or at least a politician beholden to the establishment. Thus, he grows more vulnerable to being seen as part of some hidden, truth-obscuring deep state apparatus. Whether they blame Trump or some other shadowy actor for making him this way, it allows them to apply their conspiratorial worldview for explaining a hard truth to swallow: Trump lied to them."

President Donald Trump has split his MAGA base so fiercely, one conservative commentator is predicting long-term negative consequences for Trump’s Republican Party.

“There are parts of the Trump coalition they presumed, after 2024, would always be there,” Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist and head of the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project, said in a post on the social media platform X on Wednesday. “But if you were going to build a set of programmatic actions that would break them off the Trump coalition — start a war with Iran, raise tariffs, and destroy a huge part of the farming and rural economy in this country — all of those things have started to add up into a political chemistry that is not going to disappear tomorrow.”

Referring to Trump’s ceasefire with Iran as a “brief TACO,” referring to the acronym “Trump Also Chickens Out,” Wilson added that Trump’s voters realize “it's not going to be Barron Trump who goes to war. In fact, the Lincoln Project put out an ad about this today. It's not going to be Barron Trump who goes to war — it's going to be their kids who go to war. It's going to be their kids who fight on some desert battlefield in Iran, if Donald Trump doesn't stop doing what he's doing.”

He added, “So I think there's a great dysfunction inside the MAGA world right now, where their reflexive support of Trump — which has really been inculcated in them over a decade — has finally been challenged with something they can't explain away. They can't spin it, even to themselves, because you can't go to the gas pump and say, 'Oh, the gas doesn't really cost five dollars — right now it's $1.89.' You can't say that to yourself, no matter how much of a supporter of the president you are.”

Despite Trump hoping to heal the cracks in his base, Wilson predicted that “it's going to drag out much longer. And it has already dragged out to a point where the electoral damage is scaring the hell out of a lot of Republican elected officials.”

In contrast with Wilson, The Bulwark’s conservative commentator Tim Miller argued that Trump will need to inflict “real pain” on his own base for them to turn on him.

“The best case scenario economically is where we're at now, which is real pain for people to experience,” Miller said. “I don't think that 90% of the MAGA folks are going to stay with them. I really don't. It's hard to tell in the polls right now because there's a lag.”

A little later Miller observed, “Yes, self-described MAGA folks, 90% of them are supportive of Iran, but that's just people who are self-described MAGA folks. I mean, how many people in those polls don't self-define as MAGA folks anymore because of what's happening? As we are sitting here, literally as we are sitting here, the Marquette University law poll, which is like the gold standard in Wisconsin, they put out a poll today. Trump's net approval rating is minus 14%. which is, ‘the lowest net approval figure for him in both of his terms as president.’ I mean, these numbers are, who knows? They're catastrophic.”

By contrast conservative columnist Jim Geraghty told The Washington Post that he does not believe anything in the realm of possibility will convince Trump voters to leave their president.

“I would argue it’s more of a pugnacious attitude with a handful of immovable north stars (immigration enforcement, tariffs, disregard for multilateralism) and every other policy decision negotiable — up to and including the federal government taking an ownership stake and some degree of control over private companies,” Geraghty wrote for The Washington Post last month. As proof, he pointed to an NBC News survey in which 100 percent of self-described “MAGA Republicans” say they still support Trump; a CBS News poll put the number at 92 percent.

“Back in January, Trump boasted, ‘MAGA is me. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too,’” Geraghty said. “Other than a few exceptions such as the release of the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein files, that has been the case.”