The war in Iran is unpopular.
Polling shows most Americans aren’t supportive of the U.S. and Israeli strikes over the weekend, which killed Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Further, it shows they don’t understand the goals of the attacks or believe the Trump administration’s assertion that the operation will be quick.
President Donald Trump’s decision to join Israel’s war effort has also raised red flags among a section of his MAGA base, who supported him partly for his promises to pull American soldiers out of the Middle East and put American interests before those of foreign leaders. Among them is conspiracy theorist influencer Candace Owens, who suggested, without evidence, that slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed in September specifically over his opposition to America joining a war effort in Iran.
But the president has a small cheering section, too: hawkish politicians, conservative media hosts and online influencers who support “Operation Epic Fury,” despite its lack of congressional authorization and already-apparent effects, including dead civilians and U.S. service members. It’s a coalition that has, in some cases, spent months lobbying for the attack and in others, seemingly fallen in line because their access to the president depends on it.
Benny Johnson, a right-wing podcaster known for his serial plagiarism and proximity to the Trump administration, nodded at the unpopularity of the new war but urged his audience to exercise patience on Tuesday.
“It’s kind of like a razor’s edge,” Johnson, who previously opposed an attack in Iran, said, invoking Romans and Deuteronomy to argue that God commands Christians to support the U.S. attacks, “to know that our government is instituted rightfully by God, to wield the sword against evil men.”
Invoking the divine has been common among Trump’s supporters.
“Your bravery has set in motion the end of evil and darkness, and the beginning of the light,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., posted about Israel and Trump after the initial attack on Saturday.
For years, Fox News hosts publicly called for the end to diplomacy with Iran and the dropping of bombs. Mark Levin, host of Fox News’ “Life Liberty & Levin,” called the strikes a “spectacular, humane peace mission.” Hours before the strikes, Brian Kilmeade said on his show, “I hope the president chooses to go at it.”
Those pro-Israel conservatives got what they wanted, but the reception from the MAGA base, especially the younger, more populist wing, many of whom have criticized Israel’s war against Gaza, and some of whom are ardent antisemites, was chillier.
“What is happening to the man that I supported,” former Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene asked podcaster Megyn Kelly on Monday. “The man that denounced what happened in Iraq, the man that said no more foreign wars, no more regime change, promised it on the campaign?”
“A year in and we’re in another fucking war and we’ve got American troops being killed,” Greene said.
After Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged Monday that the United States had joined the war partly to preempt the effects of Israel’s strike, Matt Walsh broke with his Daily Wire colleague Ben Shapiro, who called the strikes “the bravest move by a president of the United States of my lifetime.”
“So he’s flat out telling us that we’re in a war with Iran because Israel forced our hand,” Walsh posted to X. “This is basically the worst possible thing he could have said.”
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who called the conflict “Israel’s’ war,” said on his podcast Monday, “This war is not being waged on behalf of American national security objectives to make the United States safer or richer.”
Nick Fuentes, a troll and avowed white supremacist, said the strikes meant “the MAGA movement is surely dead,” telling his followers not to vote Republican in the midterm elections.
And then there are the in-betweens: MAGA influencers and Trump allies like Johnson who are seemingly holding their noses to support the president and retain their followers at the same time. As clips flooded social media Monday of Kirk urging against war in Iran, Jack Posobiec, a Trump ally who warned over the summer that striking Iran “would disastrously split the Trump coalition,” seemed to change tune and strike a comparison with the more popular military attack in Venezuela.
“It’s not a forever war,” Posobiec said Monday on his “Real America’s Voice” show. “It’s not boots on the ground.”
Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also said on Monday they hadn’t, and wouldn’t, rule out sending ground troops into Iran.
Brandy Zadrozny is a senior enterprise reporter for MS NOW. She was a previously a senior enterprise reporter for NBC News, based in New York.