MAGA isolationists melt down over new Trump move

When former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) announced that she was resigning from Congress, she wasn't shy about expressing her disappointment with President Donald Trump — who, in her view, has betrayed his America First agenda with an aggressively interventionist foreign policy. Now, the MAGA Republican and former Trump ally is vehemently criticizing Trump's military strikes against Iran. And she isn't the only person in the MAGA movement who wants Trump to stay out of that country.

Washington Post reporters Emily Davies and Hannah Knowles, in an article published on March 1, explain, "President Donald Trump's major attack on Iran has rattled parts of the coalition that twice delivered him the White House, a fracture that could spell trouble for a divided GOP as the midterm elections approach. The strikes, which killed Iran's supreme leader, followed a visible buildup of U.S. forces in the Middle East. But Trump's decision to carry them out nonetheless surprised some of his supporters, who had expected the self-described anti-interventionist president to stop short of a direct attack."

Greene attacked Trump's Iran policy in a lengthy March 1 rant on X, formerly Twitter.

The far-right congresswomen tweeted, "We said 'No More Foreign Wars, No More Regime Change!' We said it on rally stage after rally stage, speech after speech. Trump, Vance, basically the entire admin campaigned on it and promised to put America FIRST and Make America Great Again. My generation has been let down, abused, and used by our government our entire adult lives and our children's generation is literally being abandoned. Thousands and thousands of Americans from my generation have been killed and injured in never ending pointless foreign wars and we said no more. But we are freeing the Iranian people. Please."

Greene continued, "There are 93 million people in Iran, let them liberate themselves. But Iran is on the verge of having nuclear weapons. Yeah sure. We have been spoon fed that line for decades and Trump told us all that his bombing this past summer completely wiped it all out. It’s always a lie and it’s always America Last. But it feels like the worst betrayal this time because it comes from the very man and the admin who we all believed was different and said no more."

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) is praising Trump's Iran operation. But MAGA Republican Blake Neff, known for producing "The Charlie Kirk Show," expressed strong reservations about the Iran strikes.

In a February 28 post on X, Neff wrote, "Charlie was opposed to a regime-change war with Iran, as was I. Wars by their nature are expensive and unpredictable. They endanger American lives and can last far, far longer than anyone anticipates. Nevertheless, President Trump has elected for regime change in Iran. As an American patriot I must hope for the best. Trump's instinct is to avoid prolonged fighting and boots on the ground. We must simply trust that he has a strategy that will prevent both."

Neff continued, "Right now some of my right-leaning friends are messaging me: 'F*** this.' 'This is extremely depressing.' 'Never voting in a national election again'…. If this war is a swift, easy, and decisive victory, most of them will get over it. But if the war is anything else, there will be a lot of anger."

Davies and Knowles note, however, that so far, "MAGA allies long skeptical of foreign intervention" have "largely stuck by the president."

"Trump officials cast the strikes on Iran last summer as a limited intervention meant to take out a nuclear threat — and pushback within his coalition faded as the conflict ended without morphing into a broader war," the Post reporters observe. "But each conflict has threatened more entanglement abroad than the last, testing the movement's tolerance.

Natalie Winters, a co-host for Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast, believes that Trump needs to do a better job explaining the Iran strikes to his MAGA base.

Winters told the Post, "The messaging, much like the Epstein files, is all over the place. I would think they would know their base better. Some of his donors are probably happy so congratulations to them."