Iran air strikes: Republicans split over support for Trump and another ‘foreign war'
This has the potential to cause a split among the president's supporters between the Republican hawks (traditional interventionists) on one side and the Maga isolationists on the other.
During his three presidential campaigns, Trump condemned former presidents for leading America into 'ridiculous endless wars'. This isolationist tilt won him plaudits with his base of those who supported him for his populist promises to 'make America great again' (Maga).
In their work on US attitudes to foreign policy and US overseas involvement, Elaine Kamarck and Jordan Muchnick of the Brookings Institution – a non-profit research organisation in Washington – looked at a range of evidence in 2023.
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They found Republicans supporting less global involvement from the US had increased from 40% to 54% from 2004 to 2017. At that time only 16% of voters supported increasing US troop presence abroad, and 40% wanted a decrease, they found. They related this change in attitudes to Trump's foreign policy position.
Fast forward to his second term, and many in the Maga camp are fiercely opposed to Trump's current posturing about leading the US into another conflict in the Middle East. Over the past few days the White House has doubled down on the line that Trump keeps repeating: 'Iran can not have a nuclear weapon'.
As Trump edges closer to committing the US to joining Israel in air strikes on Iran, Steve Bannon, a staunch Trump ally, argued that allowing the 'deep state' to drive the US into conflict with Iran would 'blow up' the coalition of Trump support.
Meanwhile, Conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson denounced those Republicans supporting action against Iran as 'warmongers' and said they were encouraging the president to drag the US into a war.
Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene, in an unusual break with Trump, openly criticised the president's stance on the Israel-Iran conflict, writing on X: 'Foreign wars/intervention/regime change put America last, kill innocent people, are making us broke, and will ultimately lead to our destruction.'
Other prominent Republican senators, including Josh Hawley and Rand Paul, have urged the president to avoid US involvement in an offensive against Iran.
Another Republican congressman, Thomas Massie, has gone even further. He has joined with a coalition of Democrats in filing a House resolution under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which would seek to prevent Trump from engaging in 'unauthorized hostilities' with Iran without Congressional consent.
These Republicans may believe their views are popular with their electoral base. In an Economist/YouGov poll in June 2025, 53% of Republicans stated that they did not think the US military should get involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran.
But Donald Trump does seem to enjoy widespread support in the US for his position that the US cannot allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. According to CNN data analysis, 83% of Republicans, 79% independents, and 79% of Democrats, agree with the president's position on this issue. This slightly confusing split suggests there could be US voter support for air strikes, but it's clear there would not be that same support for troops on the ground.
IranInfogram
Resistance from ultra-Trump die-hards, however, might put them on the wrong side of the president in the long-term. Greg Sargent, a writer at The New Republic magazine, believes that, 'people become enemies of Trump not when they substantively work against some principle he supposedly holds dear, but rather when they publicly criticize him … or become an inconvenience in any way'.
So why is Trump, to the dismay of many from within the Maga faithful, seemingly abandoning the anti-war tenet of his 'America first' doctrine? Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest magazine, thinks that 'now that Israel's assault on Iran appears to be successful, Trump wants in on the action'.
The president has several prominent Republican hawks urging him to do exactly that, and order the US Air Force to deploy their 'bunker-buster bombs'' to destroy Iran's underground arsenals. One of these is Senator Lindsey Graham.
Earlier this week on Fox News, he told Trump to be "all in … in helping Israel eliminate the nuclear threat. If we need to provide bombs to Israel, provide bombs. If we need to fly planes with Israel, do joint operations.'
Former Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell is also advocating US military action. He told CNN: 'What's happening here is some of the isolationist movement led by Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon are distressed we may be helping the Israelis defeat the Iranians,' adding that its 'been kind of a bad week for the isolationists' in the party.
The same Economist/YouGov poll mentioned earlier showed that the stance taken by these Republicans – that Iran poses a threat to the US – is a position shared by a majority of GOP voters, with 69% viewing Iran as either an immediate and serious threat to the US, or at least somewhat of a serious threat.
Some believe that Trump's evolving attitude towards American military involvement in the worsening crisis in the Middle East, however, is not a volte-face on isolationism, or an ideological pivot to the virtues of attacking Iran. Ross Douthat of the New York Times has observed that Trump 'has never been a principled noninterventionist' and that 'his deal-making style has always involved the threat of force as a crucial bargaining chip'.
It is always difficult to fully determine what Trump's foreign policy doctrine actually is. It is useful, however, to reflect on some of the president's overseas actions from his first term.
In April 2018, following a suspected chemical weapons attack by the forces of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in a Damascus suburb, Trump ordered US air strikes in retaliation for what he called an 'evil and despicable attack' that left 'mothers and fathers, infants and children thrashing in pain and gasping for air'.
This led the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, to describe Trump as 'something wholly unique in the history of the presidency: an isolationist interventionist'.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Richard Hargy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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