From ‘America First’ to ‘Always America Last’

 

National Security

From ‘America First’ to ‘Always America Last’

 

Trump promised to stop wars. His grip on his base is being questioned now that he’s started one.

 

By Toluse Olorunnipa, Jonathan Lemire, and Ashley Parker

March 2, 2026

Updated at 10:00 a.m. ET on March 2, 2026.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/03/iran-us-war-maga/686206/

 

In November, President Trump dismissed the idea that his most fervent supporters might dissent from his foreign policy. “I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else,” he told Fox News, after arguing that he had stopped numerous wars. He continued to brush off the prospect after American commandos captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “MAGA loves everything I do,” he told NBC News.

 

Despite the bluster from Trump, who once promised that he would stop wars, the president’s grip on his base is being called into question after he started one on Saturday. His decision to partner with Israel to pursue regime change in Iran has, over the past 48 hours, sparked broad pushback from some high-profile supporters who have often fallen into line previously, as well as from adoptees of Trump’s “America First” philosophy, who are now criticizing the strikes and wondering how they align with his promises to put the United States and its interests ahead of everything else.

 

Curt Mills, an anti-interventionist and the executive director of The American Conservative, told us that this is “an elite-driven war, driven, frankly, by the ‘deep state.’” Former Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, an “America First” devotee who recently broke with Trump, called it “always America last.” The Trump ally and Blackwater founder Erik Prince said that he doesn’t “see how this is in keeping with the president’s MAGA commitment.” And Tucker Carlson, a far-right podcaster who has long promoted conspiratorial views about Israel, met with Trump three times in the Oval Office over the past month, using the meetings—each lasting roughly 90 minutes—to urge the president against striking Iran. Carlson’s pitch to Trump was simple: “You need to stand up to Israel, or else you’re going to be destroyed and the country is going to be destroyed,” Carlson argued, according to someone familiar with the conversation. Israel is a country of 9 million people with no resources, Carlson continued. Why are we taking orders from them? In an interview with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl, Carlson called the decision to strike Iran “absolutely disgusting and evil.” (The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the meetings.)

 

U.S. military officials have announced that four service members have been killed in the Iran operation and four more seriously wounded. “Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends,” Trump said in a video message, pledging that he would try to limit troop deaths. “That’s the way it is.” At least nine people have been killed in Israel, where Iranian missiles have been raining down in retaliation. Deadly strikes have also hit Gulf nations, including the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. The reality of the toll of war could become clear to more Americans in the days and weeks ahead, raising the stakes for Trump’s political standing. The price of oil has spiked 10 percent since the strikes began and could reach $100 a barrel, Reuters reported. Stock futures fell last night, which some investors saw as a precursor to a potential market pullback if the war lingers. As of this morning, the S&P 500 was down 0.6 percent, and U.S. crude-oil prices were up more than 6.5 percent.

 

 

Despite his “MAGA is me” bravado, there are clear signs that Trump, along with those around him, is looking to contain the political fallout. The president told my colleague Michael Scherer in an interview yesterday that he has “agreed to talk” with Iran’s current leadership, opening the door to an early off-ramp instead of pursuing what he’d originally pitched as an opportunity for the Iranian people to “take over” their government after a debilitating military blitz. “It will be yours to take,” Trump had said in a video message to Iranians on Saturday, suggesting that he was prepared to wipe out the regime’s power centers.

 

In the hours before the operation launched, Trump huddled with his team to review the plans one last time, including assessing the risks for U.S. casualties. The gut-check meeting followed several weeks of deliberations among Trump’s top aides, several of whom had expressed reservations about the operation and its political ramifications. Some of the discussions resurfaced Trump’s campaign promises to avoid new foreign wars and prioritize the interests of the American people.

 

Trump’s ability to follow through on those promises is likely to be pivotal in determining the outcome of the midterm elections in November, Republican strategists say. The president has done little to convince his supporters that his foreign adventures will help Americans address their concerns over inflation and the cost of living. In his interview yesterday with Scherer, Trump brushed aside such concerns, calling the economy the “greatest” it has ever been and congratulating himself on a “pretty amazing” job. “I inherited very high prices, and I got them down,” he said. With the president all but declaring “mission accomplished” on the economy, several of his political allies are nervous that he is losing interest in the issue that voters have consistently listed as their top concern. Democrats have sought to remain relentlessly focused on affordability, describing Trump’s other interests—his ballroom, Greenland, Venezuela, tariffs—as departures from the promises he made on the campaign trail.

 

The pledges Trump made when he first ran for president, a decade ago, were very different. Although it seems like a lifetime ago, a central part of his 2016 campaign was denunciation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a pledge to avoid any new military entanglements in the Middle East. “We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with,” Trump said in December 2016. That streak of isolationism resonated with parts of his MAGA coalition. They mourned young American men and women who’d lost their lives thousands of miles from home, and were resentful of the billions in taxpayer dollars being sent abroad while parts of the U.S. were neglected.

 

Trump did little in the buildup to his attack on Iran to sell the American people on the war, deepening the sense of anger and betrayal felt by some in his orbit. Aside from a few bellicose social-media posts, the president did not offer much justification for strikes on Iran, leading many to believe that he was leaning toward a negotiated deal. He barely mentioned the possibility of conflict last week during his State of the Union address, tucking in a brief remark near the end of the nearly two-hour speech. White House aides said that this was in part by design, to maintain the element of surprise as much as possible if Trump decided to approve the operation. But it also left Republicans scrambling to recalibrate. The president’s political superpower is his ability to inspire almost-total fealty from his fellow Republicans, but some inside the West Wing are cognizant that Iran adds to a number of fractures that have appeared over the past few months, including tensions over the Epstein files. A senior White House aide and a former administration official in close touch with the White House told us that they believe that the MAGA anger will blow over, especially if the conflict lasts only a short time. However, another former Trump aide told us that the president’s support could erode in the long term if additional U.S. troops are killed.

 

“He ran because a big part of the MAGA base did not want another war in the Middle East,” Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat, said yesterday on NBC News’s Meet the Press, slamming the Iran campaign as “a betrayal of a decent chunk of the MAGA base.” Some Republicans agree. Khanna is teaming up with Representative Thomas Massie, one of the few Republican critics of Trump, to try to force a War Powers Resolution vote in the House. (The pair successfully forced the release of a portion of the Epstein files last year.) Khanna suggested that the resolution would find support among “America First” Republicans who otherwise consider themselves part of Trump’s base.

 

 

A poll released yesterday by Reuters/Ipsos found that only about a quarter of Americans approve of Trump’s strikes on Iran. Among Republicans, the total was 55 percent, and 42 percent of GOP voters said that they will be less likely to support the Iran campaign if it leads to “U.S. troops in the Middle East being killed or injured.” The poll was conducted before news of the campaign’s first U.S. casualties was announced. A White House official, responding anonymously to our request for comment on the MAGA schism, told us that Trump’s “first instinct is always diplomacy” but that Iran had “failed to make a deal” on its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs.

 

“As a result, President Trump is taking decisive action to eliminate major national-security threats to the American people,” the official said, crediting Trump with having the “courage” to do what his predecessors would not.

 

To be fair, vocal figures in the president’s MAGA base have expressed their displeasure with his foreign policy in the past only to come back into the fold, where many of his rank-and-file supporters remained. But if this war drags on—Trump told the Daily Mail yesterday that he expects the fighting to go on for “four weeks or so”—the case becomes far more challenging for Republicans as the calendar marches toward the midterm elections. Current and former officials we spoke with were confident that the conflict would be brief and that the American people would rally behind it. However, they acknowledged that the military campaign challenges what some supporters thought they were getting when they twice elected Trump to the presidency. “No one is going to pretend that this was the plan in 2016,” the former official said.

 

About the Authors

 

Toluse Olorunnipa

 

Jonathan Lemire

 

Ashley Parker