{"id":31631,"date":"2025-06-23T15:12:57","date_gmt":"2025-06-23T15:12:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/?p=31631"},"modified":"2025-06-23T15:12:57","modified_gmt":"2025-06-23T15:12:57","slug":"trump-vs-maga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/?p=31631","title":{"rendered":"Trump vs Maga"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This article is an on-site version of our Swamp Notes newsletter. Premium subscribers can sign up here<\/a> to get the newsletter delivered every Monday and Friday. Standard subscribers can upgrade to Premium here<\/a>, or explore<\/a> all FT newsletters<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Hello Swampians, it\u2019s Jonathan Derbyshire here, the FT\u2019s US opinion editor, filling in for Rana.<\/p>\n

On Saturday night, Americans went to bed digesting the news that the US had struck three nuclear sites in Iran, thereby joining Israel\u2019s attacks on the Islamic Republic and potentially embarking on just the kind of foreign entanglement that President Donald Trump, in his inaugural address in January, had insisted would be a thing of the past.<\/p>\n

Trump said back then that \u201cwe will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end \u2014 and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.\u201d And he declared that his \u201cproudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier\u201d.<\/p>\n

How will that ambition be advanced by Saturday\u2019s strikes, in which, according to the president himself, nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan were \u201ccompletely and totally obliterated\u201d?<\/p>\n

The extent of the damage to Iran\u2019s nuclear enrichment technology in fact remains unclear and assessing it is a question for the experts. But as far as Trump\u2019s stated aim of being a peacemaker in the Middle East is concerned, his calculation is fairly transparent. As my colleague Edward Luce, who I\u2019m delighted to have as my respondent today, wrote<\/a> a few hours after the attacks, \u201cTrump is hoping that his awesome display of power will bring the curtain down on the war\u201d. But of course, Ed went on, \u201cthat is not his decision to make\u201d. It\u2019s easier to start a war than to finish one.<\/p>\n

At the end of last week, when Trump was insisting he was going to give himself \u201ctwo weeks\u201d to decide whether or not to strike Iran, it was still possible to conclude, as Ed himself did in a column<\/a> published the day before the operation, that he was \u201cinching away from war\u201d. Indeed, this was a conclusion encouraged by the battle raging inside the Republican party \u2014 and, one assumes, the administration itself \u2014 between the \u201crestrainers\u201d, who believe the US shouldn\u2019t be lured into trying to complete a job that Israel started but couldn\u2019t finish, and born-again neoconservatives who are spoiling for war.<\/p>\n

The clearest example of these growing tensions within the intermittently fissiparous Trump coalition was the interview<\/a> \u2014 or \u201cshouting match\u201d, in Ed\u2019s accurate description \u2014 that pitted the Maga-aligned former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, who has said he believes there is \u201czero credible intelligence\u201d to suggest that Iran is building a nuclear bomb, and Texas senator and uber-Iran hawk Ted Cruz.<\/p>\n

\u201cEach,\u201d Ed observed, \u201cclaimed to be the keeper of the Trumpian flame from polar opposite positions. Trump\u2019s managerial style is usually to encourage squabbling between underlings. That enhances his role as the decider.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, in Ed\u2019s reading of things, such internecine squabbling, while a sign of real divisions, should not distract us from the fact that \u201cit is Israel\u2019s Benjamin Netanyahu\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009who has been dictating the agenda\u201d on Iran over the past few weeks. The real \u201cbattle for Trump\u2019s mind\u201d, in Ed\u2019s view, is thus between Netanyahu, \u201cwho needs the US to finish the war that he started\u201d, and Trump\u2019s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who has a \u201cdirect line to the Maga base\u201d and argues that the president should not be tricked into an \u201cIsrael First\u201d policy.<\/p>\n

Addressing the nation on Saturday night after the US attack, Trump thanked Netanyahu and God \u2014 in that order. Netanyahu\u2019s gleeful congratulating of the president for deciding to use the \u201cawesome and righteous might of the United States\u201d against Iran told you all you needed to know.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As for Bannon, he didn\u2019t hold back. Netanyahu, he said, is the \u201clast guy on earth you should be thanking\u201d. By apparently tying his fate to that of the Israeli prime minister, Bannon added, Trump is in danger of alienating the many in his base who have supported him precisely because of his stated allergy to misbegotten adventures abroad. \u201cHe has got to talk to Maga,\u201d Bannon said. \u201cThere are a lot of Maga that are not happy about this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ed, my question for you is a simple one: how worried should Trump be about growing dissent inside the Maga camp over war with Iran? And what can he do \u2014 or is he willing to do \u2014 to placate those, like Bannon, who are opposed to further escalation? On Sunday morning, vice-president JD Vance, whose instincts have always been those of a \u201crestrainer\u201d, insisted that the US has \u201cno interest in a protracted conflict. We have no interest in boots on the ground.\u201d Will Bannon and others in the Maga-sphere find that at all reassuring?<\/p>\n

Recommended reading<\/h2>\n