The MAGA Civil War Is Just Getting Started
Greene, Carlson, Owens, and Jones—all in slightly different ways—have been channeling many of the novel parts of Trump’s politics: populism, conspiracy theorizing, and a profound distrust of political, economic, and cultural elites. They have advanced Trump’s agenda while also filling its holes and fleshing it out—part of a larger effort on the right to translate his rambling, discursive speeches and unhinged tweets into a coherent, populist movement. But in his second term, Trump has all but abandoned the idea that his movement has any intellectual foundation or, for that matter, coherence: MAGA simply means whatever he says it does, even if it directly contradicts past promises. In March, responding to early critics of the Iran war who rightly attacked it as a betrayal of his anti-interventionist promises, Trump responded with three words: “MAGA is Trump.”
Nowhere is this more apparent than on the war, where a president who promised to end stupid, costly foreign interventions is bogged down in one. Carlson went as far as to urge U.S. military figures to disobey orders that could kill Iranian civilians: “Now it’s time to say ‘no, absolutely not,’ and say it directly to the president, ‘no,’” he said in a recent episode of his podcast, where he described Trump’s threats against Iranians as “evil.” Greene used the same word and went even further, tweeting, “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization.” (The Twenty-Fifth Amendment allows for the removal of a president who “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”) Jones also called for Trump’s removal, saying his threats were “the definition of genocide.”
They’re not alone on the MAGA right. Steve Bannon, the onetime Trump campaign svengali who helped get him elected in 2016 and briefly served as his senior adviser during his first term, has grown more critical of the war and recently hosted a guest who suggested Trump’s threats might constitute “war crimes” if carried out. Mike Cernovich, another conspiracy-minded member of the far-right, suggested Trump had not only lost touch with the movement but that it was “silly to claim Trump is MAGA” at all thanks in large part to the war. As far as factional battles go, this one doesn’t have a lot of drama, at least in the short-term: None of these figures have anything close to the level of influence Trump does right now.
