President Donald Trump’s war in Iran has split his MAGA base, and MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough agreed that has presented a “massive problem” for Republicans going forward.
The 79-year-old president’s counterterrorism chief Joe Kent resigned Tuesday over the war, saying the joint U.S.-Israel military operation was unjustified because Iran posed no serious threat to national security. The Dispatch’s David Drucker told MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” that Republicans were worried about the political fallout.
“Republicans on the Hill and the people in the trenches working campaigns knew that this was a tough midterm election for Republicans to begin with as we rounded the corner from last year into this year,” Drucker said. “There was initially some thinking in the late summer, early fall, that this Trump presidency, from a political standpoint, was unfolding a little bit differently than the first term. Some of the numbers suggested that, and then with concerns about affordability, the cost of living, and then, now the mass deportation program, things really began to unravel.”
“We’re now in a place where Republicans that I talked to are talking openly about the Senate majority being in play,” he added, “not that it’s necessarily on its way out in the same way that the House of Representatives majority is on its way out, likely, but that it’s in play, and that’s a new development.”
Republicans have been worried about the Iran war’s impact on voter turnout in the fall, but Drucker suggested the conflict would have far-reaching consequences for the GOP.
“When I talked to Republicans, this could surely impact voter turnout for Republicans in terms of getting the full element of the Trump coalition out in 2026,” he said. “But I think what this really portends is difficulty for the next Republican nominee to reconstitute the Trump coalition in 2028, because Trump’s a unique figure. Obviously, a lot of people have issues with him, but on the Republican side, you know, as I like to say, and as the numbers show, he’s just normal enough for the normies and he’s just out there enough for the populists and the conspiracy theorists and the people who think everything’s rigged, to get them to show up — and they normally don’t show up because they just think there’s no point in showing up because all politicians are the same.”
“How do you recreate that coalition in 2028?” Drucker asked. “This is where these splinters, to me, are very significant, and it’s sort of similar to what we saw with Barack Obama and the Democratic coalition. Once he was no longer a candidate, the Democrats had a hard time, you know, putting together his coalition.”
Scarborough agreed, saying that Trump remains incredibly popular among Republicans — but that popularity was no more transferable than Obama’s was to another Democratic candidate or Ronald Reagan’s was with another GOP candidate.
“JD Vance just, he’s completely disappeared because this obviously is the antithesis of everything he said during the campaign that he and Donald Trump would be doing together, and so it is a fascinating time,” Scarborough said.
“The danger here is that Donald Trump, in 2016 and 2024, was able to energize people that didn’t usually get out and vote,” he added. “Those people are American firsters. They hate wars, they hate, you know, they’re the people that were shouting the loudest about the Epstein files.
“You have all of these things that are not going to show a massive collapse in polls for wars during the middle of a war from Republicans. But those are the people who stay home midterms. It’s not about who gets out to vote so often. It’s who’s depressed, who’s disappointed in their party in power and who stays home, and right now that seems to be a massive, massive problem on the horizon for Republicans.”
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