MAGA Warned Trump on Iran. Now He’s In An Impossible Position.

 

MAGA Warned Trump on Iran. Now He’s In An Impossible Position.

 

The president ran on ending forever wars. But Israel’s Thursday night strike on Iran could force his hand.

 

By Rachael Bade

06/12/2025 10:56 PM EDT

Updated: 06/13/2025 10:07 AM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/06/12/israel-iran-trump-maga-00403531

 

Rachael Bade is POLITICO's Capitol bureau chief and senior Washington columnist. She is a former co-author of POLITICO Playbook and co-author of "Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress's Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump." Her reported column, Corridors, illuminates how power pulses through Washington, from Capitol Hill to the White House and beyond.

 

President Donald Trump campaigned on ending what his base has long derided as U.S. foreign adventurism, leading the rebellion against an establishment that long favored international interventions.

 

Now some of his most vocal supporters fear Israel — and possibly Trump himself — may have trampled his ability to make good on that promise.

 

The Jewish nation’s decision to conduct a pre-emptive strike on Tehran’s nuclear facilities on Thursday night threatens to draw the United States into a Middle East conflict — and split the MAGA coalition that catapulted Trump back into the Oval Office.

 

While administration officials say the U.S. played no part in the offensive, it was unclear as of Thursday night whether the U.S. will be able to actually stay on the sidelines. Trump — who Friday morning reiterated U.S. support for Israel and even praised the strike, less than a day after asking Israel to stand -down —will almost certainly feel compelled to help defend Israel against counter-attacks by Iran.

 

And there are real questions about how Tehran — which was slated to meet with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff for the latest round of peace talks on Sunday — will react. Will they, for instance, blame the U.S. and retaliate on American bases in the region, forcing Trump’s hand into a military operation he long campaigned against?

 

The entire situation is infuriating the MAGA base, whose leaders had been imploring Trump to stop Israel in recent days. But the president either tried and failed, highlighting his lack of sway with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu — or he privately greenlit the campaign against the warnings of his base.

 

Either way, the president who insisted his negotiating prowess would usher in a new age of world peace, now finds himself in perhaps the diciest situation of his presidency: facing down the possibility of leaving Israel to fend for itself — or joining it in going toe to toe with Iran.

 

“What the president does from here could end up defining his presidency,” MAGA scribe Matt Boyle of Breitbart told me just after news of the strikes. “He has to balance protecting America’s greatest ally in the region in Israel with avoiding getting the USA drawn into war.”

 

Others in the MAGA-sphere are more blunt. After suggesting Thursday night that “Israel has now made a mockery of the United States” and calling the attack “deliberate sabotage… to force us into war,” Breaking Points host Saagar Enjeti trained his ire on Trump Friday morning.

 

“Trump has now praised Israel’s strike, affirmed US material support; and Israeli media is reporting his public opposition was a disinformation campaign to mislead Iran,” he wrote. “So in other words Trump, not Israel, has made a mockery of all of us wanted to avoid this war.”

 

Indeed, moments after the strike occurred, Trump ally Charlie Kirk went live with his supporters and declared the entire situation a mess that “is now going to have major American domestic implications.” Americans will once again start debating whether to finance Israel and sell them arms, he said — and if we do, Tehran could react.

 

“As you very well know, I’m very pro-Israel on this show; I’m just simply interpreting the political dynamics here,” he said. “And I could tell you right now that the audience, you guys ... are not thrilled with this situation at all.”

 

“The question is also, I think fundamentally at its core: How does the America First foreign policy doctrine and foreign policy agenda … stay consistent with this right now?” he asked.

 

Israel’s offensive came after pleas to the president from the MAGA base reached a fever pitch on Thursday. Some of the most high-profile figures of the movement took to social media, podcasts and television imploring Trump to intervene to stop it, believing that he actually could.

 

Kirk — the Turning Point USA leader who’s become a de facto whip for the administration— warned that a strike on Iran “will cause a massive schism in MAGA.” Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief at the right-wing publication, The Federalist — who frequently lavishes praise on Trump on Fox News — argued that allowing the Israeli strike “would be seen as an unforgivable betrayal by millions of American voters.”

 

Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec warned that the midterms are nearing and wondered: “What do you think a new Middle East conflict with Iran would do to summer gas prices?” And on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast two days in a row, Boyle insisted that “it’s incredibly important that President Trump resist the pressure” for military action.

 

“The president listens to the base — it’s his best quality,” Boyle had told me earlier in the day.“Clearly people across the MAGA movement are watching what’s happening very closely and are concerned that any moves by globalists and neocon forces to drag the United States into another endless war in the Middle East would cause serious political damage to the president.”

 

Just a few days ago, many of these types were only talking about this issue privately — if they were talking about it at all. For the few who went public, they directed their criticism at hawks like Mark Levin or others they deem “warmongers,” as I wrote three days ago.

 

But in light of evacuation orders for some State and other U.S. officials in the region, those pleas took on new urgency on Thursday — and were being redirected at the man they put in the Oval Office.

 

The public pleas presumed, of course, that Trump had the sway to actually stop Israel from forging ahead on its own. While many experts have suggested Israel would want a “green light” from Trump before acting, all of a sudden some began questioning whether that was still the case.

 

Speaking to reporters at a bill signing Thursday, Trump bluntly warned that an Israeli strike on Iran “could very well happen” — though he made clear his preference is for diplomacy and that he’s asked Israelis to hold off. But Trump allies have argued that it won’t matter if the U.S. isn’t technically the country to start the war — if Israel gets involved, so will the U.S.

 

The White House appears to recognize the political sensitivities. Throughout the day, officials appeared to closely monitor the MAGA pushback on Iran: At 11:57 a.m. Enjeti highlighted a nugget in a CBS story reporting that Trump was “weighing options.. .to support Israeli military action without leading it ... including aerial refueling or intelligence sharing.”

 

“The narrative of an independent Israeli strike is bunk then,” he wrote. “This would be a U.S. sanctioned operation, and we must stand against it.”

 

One hour later, Enjeti updated his followers that he got “some push back from a WH official,” who said the U.S. won’t be involved in a strike by Israel “at least for now.” (I was told the same last night by an administration official before the strike.)

 

I called up Enjeti Thursday afternoon to get his take on what’s going on. The first thing he did was draw my attention to a 2011 video clip of Trump slamming President Barack Obama, claiming that “our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate.”

 

“He’s weak and he’s ineffective,” Trump said of Obama. “We have a real problem in the White House.”

 

The clip, Enjeti said, was making the rounds on Thursday among MAGA types.

 

“It’s being passed around specifically because that was a key tenet of his indictment of the George W. Bush/neoconservative wing of the party,” Enjeti said. What’s happening now “is very counter to the things he said from the very beginning, on the campaign trail — it flies really in the face of the way he talked about ‘stupid leaders who pursue disastrous foreign wars.’”

 

By the end of Thursday, Trump appeared to be getting the message, doubling down on his insistence that he wants to avoid a new Middle East conflict.

 

“We remain committed to a Diplomatic Resolution to the Iran Nuclear Issue!” he wrote on Truth Social. “My entire Administration has been directed to negotiate with Iran.”

 

Hours after he posted that missive, Israel struck Tehran.