Three days before President Donald Trump authorized strikes against Iran last June, the prominent conservative activist Charlie Kirk sat in the Oval Office and expressed his concerns about the United States becoming involved in another drawn-out conflict in the Middle East.
Kirk, an influential pro-Trump leader closely attuned to the president’s MAGA base, had spent the preceding weeks issuing public warnings on his podcast and social media channels. Along with other conservative influencers like Stephen K. Bannon and Tucker Carlson, Kirk warned against pursuing regime change in Iran and the potential for the U.S. to get pulled into a longer war.
“We must resist the siren song of displacing dictators in lands we do not understand and we have no business running,” Kirk said on his show on June 13. “I could tell you right now, our MAGA base does not want a war, at all, whatsoever. They do not want U.S. involvement. They do not want the United States to be engaged in this.”
But as the president now weighs just that — potentially launching an extended military assault on Iran, and signaling openness to toppling its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — the MAGA movement’s public and private lobbying against it is much more muted this time.
“America First”-aligned leaders and commentators told The Washington Post this week that the change stems from a combination of factors: increased trust in Trump after the operations he authorized in Iran and Venezuela remained limited in scope; fear of burning a bridge with a president who has increasingly shut out his conservative critics; uncertainty about what type of action is even on the table; and resignation to the idea that Trump will ultimately go as far as he wants to — and is already well aware of his base’s opposition to extended war.
A day after Kirk’s June 18 visit with Trump, Bannon was at the White House for several hours, dining with the president and warning against a regime-change war as Trump weighed military action against Iran. Carlson, who had publicly issued dire predictions of thousands of American deaths in the first week of a war with Iran, spoke with Trump by phone — a conversation in which Carlson apologized for the intensity of some of his recent rhetoric, Trump later claimed, but stood by his concerns about military strikes.
Trump proceeded with authorizing strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, and they took place June 21, though the bombings were over quickly. Some in the MAGA sphere believed that their interventions swayed Trump to keep the scope limited, since he was being urged by some hawkish conservatives to launch a more involved war.
But in the months that followed, Kirk was assassinated, leaving the MAGA movement without an influential commentator whose infrequent criticisms were usually well-received by the White House. Carlson, meanwhile, was mocked for incorrect predictions about the scale of military operations in Iran and Venezuela, and Bannon, while remaining critical of the idea of an extended war, has tempered his criticisms and used his “War Room” show to discuss a range of scenarios for how involved the U.S. might be in any upcoming attack on Iran.
“There’s less of a debate playing out in public because of the fact that the president’s earned a lot of trust,” said Matthew Boyle, Washington bureau chief for the conservative Breitbart News and a frequent “War Room” guest. “That’s evidenced by the doctrine he’s been clearly defining since he returned to office.” That doctrine, Boyle said in an interview, involves “very precise action” and “clearly defining what’s the American interest” in taking action — which can’t lead to “long, drawn-out war that costs thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.”
Prominent MAGA commentators are also not rushing to condemn Trump’s expected action.
“It’s because we had the desired effect last time,” said one popular pro-Trump influencer who had urged against striking Iran last year, referring to the more muted response. This person and other MAGA movement leaders spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their strategy when it comes to preserving relationships with the White House. “No massive, prolonged war as some sides were lobbying him for.”
“I don’t think anyone’s stoked about it,” another influential MAGA commentator said of anticipated military action, but “the volume is lower.”
Another leader in the MAGA movement described a simultaneous sense of hope that diplomatic negotiations could still prevail and resignation to the idea that Trump may proceed with a war to bring about regime change despite knowing the risks.
“We’ve gone through this exercise before. We don’t need to go through it again,” the person said of pushing back on action in Iran. “You know where people stand. You should be seeing the polling, and if you feel comfortable going ahead, you know, bear the consequences.”
This person added that MAGA influencers know they must “thread the needle” on pushback on Israel and action against Iran, and “have learned the lessons of MTG and even Tucker — these people that he just doesn’t listen to anymore.” (MTG stands for Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former U.S. representative and onetime Trump ally.)
In a statement to The Washington Post, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said that all of Trump’s actions “have put America First while making the entire world safer,” and that he “listens to a variety of opinions on any issue, but ultimately decides based on what is best for our country and national security.”
“As the leader of the MAGA movement, the President understands his base constituency better than anyone — and MAGA knows to trust in President Trump,” Kelly said.
Andrew Kolvet, the longtime executive producer of “The Charlie Kirk Show” who has taken over hosting duties after Kirk’s death, said this time, many of Trump’s supporters are waiting to see what these potential strikes look like.
“We’ve seen — Trump uses targeted, limited, violent kinetic attacks, and when he does, it doesn’t come with a ground invasion or typical long, drawn-out conflicts,” Kolvet told The Post. “I think a lot of the president’s base is taking a wait-and-see approach and learning to allow the process to play out.”
On the show Thursday, Kolvet and co-host Blake Neff discussed Kirk’s strong opposition to a ground war with Iran — including showing a tweet from him from 2019 saying it would be a “massive mistake.” And similarly to Kirk’s message when he issued warnings about starting a war in Iran, they emphasized that they believed Trump would not go that far.
“This is the largest buildup since 2003,” Kolvet said of the U.S. military presence moving into the region. “The voters, all the polling, say we’re desperate for domestic reform and domestic focus. I hope we can do that.”
Although many prominent MAGA political voices may be quieter on Iran than they were in June, some foreign policy experts who have advocated a more limited approach to using the military have continued to raise the alarm. Many say Trump is risking getting pulled into precisely the kind of never-ending Middle East war that he has long criticized.
“Trump has learned his lessons, in a way. I think they’re the wrong lessons,” said Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates a more limited military footprint. “After Trump went into Venezuela and snatched [President Nicolás] Maduro with no casualties, no American deaths, in this amazing, spectacular military operation, I think he’s like the guy at the casino who’s winning, and he’s going to keep winning. I think that psychology is mistaken.”
Trump has often been quick to threaten military action over the past year, and he has attacked the Houthi militia group in the Red Sea, Iran’s nuclear program and a militant group in Nigeria, in addition to the raid on Venezuela’s leader.
But those operations have all been limited in scope, with clear and quick endpoints, and have posed relatively little threat to U.S. troops. A large-scale attack on Iran would be significantly different from everything Trump has done until now.
“It’s a much larger operation that he’s threatening. The objectives are very broad, ” Kelanic said. “If the goal is really regime change, which many of us worry it could be, that is a long-term-horizon kind of outcome, which does seem different from what Trump wants. Overall, Trump has been very critical of these open-ended wars in the Middle East that were fought for no imminent reason. There’s no imminent security threat to the United States from Iran.”
Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative, a magazine opposing the neoconservative worldview, said that while he doesn’t see anyone who opposed war in June now supporting one, part of the reason for the lack of “extremely intense” pushback on the right is that “people see Trump has gotten away with all this crap,” referring to other strikes that didn’t result in political problems, “so don’t cry wolf.”
But the situation now is also different than in June, Mills said. Then, a clear war was already underway with Israel’s bombing of Iran after negotiations ended. The question was whether the U.S. would join Israel’s efforts. This time, it’s unclear what action is on the table.
“I think the main thing is the war hasn’t started, and I think the pushback will be extreme once it does,” Mills said. “If it does.”
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