MAGA Turns on Itself, and It's Ugly

This is the only way they know how to do politics.

There’s a bit of a disagreement happening among influential media personalities in MAGA world, a rift opened up by the Iran War. On one side are those who will support whatever Donald Trump does, many of whom have long yearned to see Iran reduced to a smoking pile of rubble as its heathen citizenry are sent to burn forever in the Lake of Fire; on the other side are people who actually believed Trump when he said he didn’t want to start any more wars. And they are not being polite about their little tiff.

I bring this to your attention not only because I’m not above taking pleasure in the enraged buffoonery of some of the worst people on Earth, but also because this does have serious implications for the political future we’ll all be living in.

The backstory is that a rift has opened up on the far right — or it might be more accurate to say that multiple rifts have opened up along a variety of lines, but Iran has become the immediate focus. Because the right-wing media universe is vast and complex, it has room for both establishment outlets like Fox News and individual entrepreneurs like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly (both of whom are ex-Foxers), Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes, all of whom know that they can grow their audiences through conflict and shock-mongering. Sometimes, that means starting fights with other influential conservatives.

Which is what happened this past weekend. Kelly, you see, has been critical of the war, which has enraged influential radio and Fox host Mark Levin, who has long been privately encouraging Trump to blow Iran to smithereens and is now one of the war’s biggest boosters. So naturally, he went on X to lob a series of nasty personal insults at Kelly, and just as naturally, she responded by saying he has a “micropenis.”

Levin then responded by calling Kelly a “harlot,” and the recently exiled Marjorie Taylor Greene chimed in to say “I wholeheartedly support Megyn Kelly telling the world that Mark Levin has a micropenis.” Classy all around!

The president is not happy to see the kids fighting, but the most important thing is that fealty must be paid to him. Or as he put it in one of a series of angry Truth Social posts, Iran critics “ARE NOT MAGA, I AM, and MAGA includes not allowing Iran, a Sick, Demented, and Violent Terrorist Regime, to have a nuclear weapon to blow up the United States of America.”

In related news, Ted Cruz, who will probably start running for president later this year, is shocked, shocked to find that his party is overrun with antisemites:

The idea that Qatar would have to pay Republicans, especially the young groyper set, to be antisemitic is absurd; they’re doing it all on their own, because it’s who they are and what they believe. This upsets Senator Cruz, who thinks Republicans should stick to their virulent anti-Muslim bigotry but not aim their hatred at the Jews. But his way of criticizing these Republicans isn’t to say they must be shown the error of their ways; it’s to make the same accusation Republicans make against liberals, that they’re being paid by sinister outside forces.

Trouble is, once you build a movement and a political style around hate, personal insults, performative conflict, and conspiracy theorizing, it’s not easy to channel it only in the directions you want. This is the beast Trump and Republicans created, and it can only be controlled for so long.

What MAGA is made of

When you feed your supporters a line of baloney like “I won’t start any new wars,” even if you don’t mean it, they might actually start to believe it. This has to do with the way political ideology works in general: Rather than deciding what we believe and then choosing the party that represents those beliefs, we take on a party as part of our identity and adopt its beliefs (this is an old idea in political science). When the party changes, we update our beliefs to align with the party.

Back in 2016, the people who would become Trump’s supporters were pulled in different directions on the subject of overseas adventurism. The Iraq War was a Republican production, but it had gone terribly. Their leaders defended it, but only half-heartedly; there was a lot of “If we knew then what we know now, we would have made different decisions.” Then Trump came along offering Republican voters all kinds of things they liked on issues such as immigration, and also said that the war was stupid and we should be going around invading other countries because it was more trouble than it was worth.

Because Trump said this while also being a misogynist and a racist and someone prone to all kinds of violent rhetoric, his opposition to Iraq-type adventures didn’t come off as “weak” to them, and they embraced it, making it part of their own belief system. It didn’t have to violate their identity as Republicans to think that we shouldn’t do that kind of war again. But then it turned out Trump never believed it in the first place, at least as a general principle (he still thinks the Iraq War was stupid, but not that we shouldn’t wage more wars). That is causing a lot of cognitive dissonance on the right.

This is an unusual situation, because most of the time, parties don’t make this kind of rapid wholesale shift in position. They evolve, usually slowly, and sometimes new issues come along, the party’s leaders decide where they stand, and their constituents follow. It’s extremely unusual to see the kind of sudden turn that the Iran War represents, and that is making it harder for at least some of Trump’s supporters to follow him through this pirouette. He’d like them to believe that he’s still opposed to nation-building; he just wants to bomb the crap out of Iran for a couple months then declare victory and leave. But that kind of subtlety is lost on them.

Especially when the war seems to be causing all kinds of problems, like spiking the price of gas. All this together opens up a space for people like Carlson and Kelly to present themselves as principled by opposing Trump on the war, which they know will produce attention-grabbing conflict with their peers who are more slavishly devoted to Trump.

And when they turn on each other, they aren’t going to do it through polite disagreement. The whole conservative movement has assimilated Trump’s style into their DNA. This is how they do politics now: When you disagree with someone, you call them a harlot or say they have a micropenis, and encourage your audience to turn that disagreement into hatred and rage.

It will take a good long time for that to change even after Trump is gone. I’m sure that at least one or two prominent Republicans are going to run for president in 2028 promising a gentler kind of politics, a return to good manners and civil discourse. And they’re going to get destroyed in the primaries. I don’t know if Ted Cruz is going to accuse Josh Hawley of having a micropenis, or if Ron DeSantis is going to call Nikki Haley a harlot, but their surrogates and advocates certainly will.

It is going to be exceedingly ugly, driven by the shared assumption that the route to power is to be as much like Donald Trump as possible. And while that might be true in those primaries, it isn’t likely to win over a majority of the electorate. If that was really what most voters want, Trump’s approval would be a lot higher than it is.

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