When President Trump was pressed this week about his administration’s conflicting messages on mass deportations, he did not offer much clarity.
“Everybody’s right,” he said.
Since his first campaign for president 10 years ago, Mr. Trump has excelled at appearing to favor both sides of the same issue, allowing supporters to hear what they want to hear, whether he’s talking about tariffs, TikTok, abortion, tax cuts or more.
But the prospect that the United States might join Israel in bombing Iran is testing his ability to embrace dueling positions with little to no political cost. Some of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters — those who defended him during multiple investigations and ultimately returned him to the White House — are ripping each other to shreds over the idea, and at times lashing out at Mr. Trump himself, as well.
The war in Iran is exactly the kind of Middle East entanglement that Mr. Trump’s anti-interventionist base believed he was bitterly opposed to, because he repeatedly said he was. But he is also the same president who, in his first term, authorized missile strikes in Syria after its leadership used chemical weapons on citizens, and the assassination of a top Iranian general, Qassim Suleimani — two actions he took pride in.
To Mr. Trump, the contradictions are not actually contradictions.
“I think I’m the one that decides that,” he told The Atlantic recently in response to criticism from one of his most vocal anti-interventionist supporters, Tucker Carlson, who said the president’s support for Israel’s fight in Iran ran against his “America First” message.
Mr. Trump was propelled to victory in the Republican primary in 2016 as an outsider, in part because he forcefully condemned the invasion of Iraq, authorized by the last Republican president more than a decade before, and the seemingly endless war that followed. Yet he said the United States should have taken the country’s oil, and ran radio ads saying he would “bomb the hell” out of the Islamic State.
He has said he wants to renew the tax cuts he put into effect in his first term, which saved some of the wealthiest earners millions, while also suggesting that congressional Republicans should implement a new tax on the wealthiest.
He has said he supports businesses and also wants to deport the immigrant work force that fuels parts of the economy. He wants to engage in mass deportation and also wants to sell visas for $5 million. He has celebrated the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade as a point of pride, while also condemning Republican governors who signed bills banning most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
He has both celebrated and criticized his own criminal justice reform bill of 2018.
Despite the contradictions, Republicans for years have been united in support of Mr. Trump and what he says he wants, giving him a benefit of the doubt that few if any career politicians have ever received. Even when most elected Republicans held Mr. Trump at a distance after the deadly attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump still had a tight grip on Republican primary voters.
Mr. Trump, a celebrity known to the electorate for decades, has obscured longstanding and unresolved foreign policy divisions within the party dating back to the aftermath of President George W. Bush’s push to invade Iraq.
But as Mr. Trump decides whether to plunge the United States into the heart of the Israel-Iran conflict, his core supporters are splintering.
Mr. Trump’s announcement on Thursday that he could take up to two weeks to decide did not sit well with some of his most hawkish supporters. On social media, the Fox News host Mark Levin began a lengthy post by suggesting that the president was being pulled back from what he actually wants to do. “LET TRUMP BE TRUMP!” Mr. Levin wrote. “We got our answer. Iran says no unconditional surrender. Again. And again. And again. They cheat and lie and kill. They’re TERRORISTS!”
His anti-interventionist supporters, meanwhile, have been equally alarmed by what he might decide to do. “Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted on social media over the weekend.
Mr. Trump’s advisers say that, on the Israel-Iran conflict in particular, the president is dealing with a fast-moving, complicated situation that does not lend itself to simple, black-and-white solutions, despite the fact that he has consistently campaigned that way.
“President Trump considers the nuances of every issue, but ultimately takes decisive action to directly benefit American families,” said Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman. “The American people trust this president to make the right decisions,” she said, adding that he “started the Make America Great Again movement because he represents a new leadership that puts Americans first.”
Mr. Trump’s inconsistencies were clear in 2011, the year he gave his debut speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Up until then, the most vocal opponent of the Iraq war among Republican presidential prospects was Representative Ron Paul of Texas, a libertarian who had a relatively small but persistent and noisy following.
Mr. Trump gave a nod to Mr. Paul in his remarks as he positioned himself as the person who could best succeed with a similar anti-establishment message.
“I like Ron Paul, I think he is a good guy, but honestly he has just zero chance of getting elected,” Mr. Trump said. “You have to win an election.” Two months later, Mr. Trump suggested a form of aggression that would be acceptable, telling an interviewer that the United States should “take the oil” in Iraq as payment for its own efforts there.
At the time, Mr. Paul was a fringe figure whose main media attention came from coverage of him as a gadfly. Mr. Trump, able to command seemingly endless media attention, absorbed Mr. Paul’s support base and was able to reshape the Republican Party in the process.
But in 2025, Mr. Trump is not the only one who can command media attention.
Mr. Carlson is no longer on Fox News, but he has a show that streams on the website X, and is a leading voice among foreign policy “restrainers” who have argued that Mr. Trump would be acting against his own movement should he strike Iran.
Stephen K. Bannon, an adviser who was exiled from the White House in the first year of Mr. Trump’s first term, has become one of the dominant voices among the MAGA faithful with his “War Room” podcast, delivering the same message as Mr. Carlson.
Yet Mr. Trump has found that many of his allies will ultimately come back to him, despite unhappiness with some of his decisions.
Mr. Bannon’s split with Mr. Trump healed in 2020. And Mr. Trump has frustrated Mr. Carlson before, particularly after the Suleimani assassination in January 2020.
At the time, Mr. Carlson condemned the killing. But by the time Mr. Trump was again the nominee in 2024, Mr. Carlson was one of his vocal supporters.
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
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