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.

With the United States' 2026 midterms only two and one-half months away, GOP strategists are hoping that a strong turnout from MAGA voters will help them hold both branches of Congress. But a disillusioned MAGA voter in Iowa, according to MS NOW and the Daily Beast, is a troubling sign for Republicans.

Iowa resident Shane Foot voted for Trump in three U.S. presidential elections in a row: 2016, 2020 and 2024. In an interview with MS NOW reporter Alex Tabet, however, Foot laid out some reasons why he has grown frustrated and disillusioned with the 80-year-old president.

Interviewed at the Iowa State Fair, Foot cited inflation as a key reason for his frustration.

Foot told Tabet, "The prices haven't gone down. I don't know, I'm just, I'm over it, I think, over the Trump thing, the Trump wagon — whatever you want to call it."

In the 2024 presidential election, many Trump voters pointed to inflation as a top reason for their decision. And that included hardcore MAGA voters and the Trump base as well as independents and swing voters — some of whom had voted for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.

But Foot voted for Trump, not Biden, in 2020 — and now, he is finally giving up on the president.

When Tabet asked Foot what he would tell Trump about the Iran war, tariffs and the economy, the Iowa voter responded, "Stop the bulls––. Make America great, like you said, that's what I'd say."

The Daily Beast's Cameron Adams points to Foot's frustration as a very bad sign for Trump, describing the Iowa voter's comments during the MS NOW interview as a "fiery tirade against the increasingly unpopular 80-year-old."

Adams notes, "Trump's appeal is continuing to dwindle within his own supporter base, a dangerous sign ahead of the looming midterm elections. Only 35 percent of Republicans said they 'strongly approve' of Trump's performance in a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the president's approval rating continues to sink as his war with Iran keeps gas prices soaring."

Many polls are showing independents growing frustrated with Trump. But the fact that Foot voted for Trump three times in a row, according to Adams, is especially important.

"Trump's net approval rating remained stuck at an alarming 33 percent, the lowest of his presidency, according to Reuters," Adams observes. "Remarkably, 64 percent of Americans said they disapprove of his job as president."

President Donald Trump's war in Iran has long been derided by defense experts for being unsustainable, yet the Republican continues to insist that the war is "small potatoes" and working out in his favor. Yet according to a recent report, the last week alone contained so much bad news from the conflict that it's impossible for Trump to wave it off.

"In this week alone, 13 separate incidents in the Middle East prove this is not the ghost war the president is trying to convince his MAGA base it is," The Daily Beast's David Gardner reported on Sunday. "This isn’t TV reality. It’s the real thing. Trump’s biggest bluff didn’t work. He should have folded. Instead, he twisted. Into knots. And now he is trying to pretend it never happened."

Noting that 18 American soldiers have been killed and 820 have been wounded since the conflict started, Gardner elaborated on just a handful of the violent incidents that have recently occurred which prove the Iran war is a bigger deal than Trump is making it out to be.

"Overnight Iranian attacks on Tuesday also hit the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, damaging as many as nine U.S. aircraft," Gardner wrote. "Missiles 'struck the maintenance, preparation, and deployment sites of F-35, F-16, and F-15 fighter jets, as well as their shelters, inflicting heavy damage on the enemy,' claimed the IRGC."

He added, "In Kuwait this week, Iran claimed it attacked America’s Ali Al Salem Air Base with bombs and drones and struck the rooms of a U.S. commander. Off the coast, more details emerged about a 19-year-old sailor who tried to jump to his death from the rusting USS Lincoln as Patriot missile stockpiles were depleted and diesel prices hit an all-time high of $6 a gallon on Friday."

The journalist concluded, "All this in a week that Donald Trump was seeking to convince a midterm convention in Dallas that Iran was handled. We may not like to think about it, but this war is far from over. And it could get a hell of a lot worse."

Trump's invasion of Iran is so controversial that parents of children who died in the conflict are speaking out.

"Jim Khork, along with his wife, Stacey, sat down for an exclusive interview with CBS News to share more about their grief, but also, their frustrations about what they consider is a lack of accountability for military shortcomings ahead of the deadly attack," CBS News' Jonah Kaplan reported on Thursday. "The Army confirmed to the Khorks and CBS News that its probe into the deadly Iranian attack was completed in early July, but they have yet to release it."

In April, an economist outlined the long-term damage the war is causing the US economy.

“I would guess that yes, destruction of Iranian (and some other) energy facilities in the Persian Gulf area will have at least a medium-term effect keeping prices for crude oil and chemical fertilizer high, and that in turn means gasoline prices may come down only slowly,” Dr. Ed Gresser, Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at the Progressive Policy Institute, told AlterNet. “Same for other petroleum-based products such as plastics, skin creams, and so on. The high potential of conflict also adds risk premiums to shipping and other costs.”

He added, “Longer-term, lots of open questions. One is whether the administration will really concede that Iran has a right to close the Strait of Hormuz and assess tolls on shipping passing through it. That would make the smaller Gulf monarchies and to some extent Iraq reliant on Iranian good will for all of their exports. Likewise, Asian countries are the main buyers of Persian Gulf energy, and their supplies would be much less secure.”