The real story behind MAGA's quiet demoralization

It’s time for a word on MAGA’s support of the president’s war against Iran. Polling seems to suggest that whatever Donald Trump wants, Donald Trump gets. The latest poll from CNN found that the war is “tremendously popular” in MAGAland.

“Look at this! Nearly nine in 10, 89 percent approve of the U.S. military action in Iran. That is the MAGA GOP base,” CNN’s Harry Enten declared Tuesday morning. “Just 9 percent disapprove of it. This is tremendously popular among the Republican base.”

But I think these numbers call for a fuller context. People who identify themselves as MAGAnites are going to give their blessing to the president. Do demoralized MAGAnites identify themselves? More likely, they tell pollsters that they’re an independent voter, an ordinary conservative, a “non-MAGA Republican” or some such.

Are some MAGAnites demoralized? There is evidence to suggest as much. A progressive pollster called Navigator released a new public opinion survey today. It found that 20 percent of Trump supporters “regret” voting for him. That includes 11 percent of self-identified “MAGA Republicans.” In both cases, the most cited reasons were “broken promises” and Trump’s war against Iran.

But you can probably better see the demoralization outside the data sets. Trump’s director of counterterrorism, Joe Kent, resigned Tuesday. His reason was Trump’s broken promise to uphold the principles of America First. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” he said, “and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

That’s the part of his resignation letter that news reports have quoted, but the rest of it reveals what Kent really meant by broken promise. In it, he sets Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran in the context of a Jewish conspiracy against the United States. In language intended to invoke that antisemitic view, he suggests that Donald Trump didn’t really mean to choose war. Instead, globalist forces assembled to force him into choosing it.

“Early in this administration, high ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran,” Kent wrote. “This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States and that should you strike now there was a clear path to swift victory. This was a lie and it is the same tactic that Israel used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”

At the risk of oversimplifying things, I would guess that Kent quit because he believed he was working for a puppet regime. I also think that’s what 11 percent of “MAGA Republicans” mean when they say that the president broke his promise. It’s not that he was insufficiently anti-war. It’s that he was insufficiently anti-Jew.

(Let me add here a note about the role of Israel in Trump’s war. Benjamin Netanyahu wanted it. It has provided cover for what appears to be an imperialist agenda. His forces have invaded Lebanon under the guise of fighting Hezbollah. What I am stating is a plain fact. What Kent does, however, is elevate fact to the point of conspiracy to intimate that Jews as inherently evil.)

While 11 percent signifies little right now, potential for growth is suggested by Kent’s resignation. Though the Republicans are so MAGAfied that they regularly humiliate themselves for the president’s entertainment, Joe Kent saw “political promise in turning on Trump,” according to The Bulwark’s Andrew Eggers.

It’s a political promise that can be found in the “shades of MAGA countercultural revolt against MAGA establishment,” Eggers said. This is evidenced by the array of rightwing influencers. “If you have a small right-wing following and you’re looking to make it a big right-wing following,” Eggers said, “and most especially if that following is concentrated among young rightwing people, it’s no longer the case that backing Trump to the hilt is the only move.”

A new poll found that the younger the MAGAnite, the more likely they are to oppose the war and its economic impacts. Forty-six percent of Trump voters ages 18 to 29 oppose the war, according to the Quincy Institute, while 37 percent of Trump voters ages 30 to 49 oppose it. The president’s strongest support, 86 percent, comes from supporters over 50 years of age who watch Fox.

Republicans are virtually united in preferring that Trump declare victory and get out, according to Quincy’s Trita Parsi. But the longer the war appears to them to go on in the name of Israel, not America, and the higher it pushes costs at home, the more potential there is for division. “Trump risks losing significant portions of his base if he escalates the war with ground troops and allows the war to further push up gas prices,” Parsi said.

Perhaps the biggest reason to be skeptical of polls suggesting that Trump’s war is “tremendously popular” in MAGAland is because young prominent rightwing influencers don’t believe them. Or if they do, they see profit in getting MAGAnites to doubt them . Carrie Prejean Boller, age 38, got herself kicked off the president’s Religious Liberty Commission by demanding to know if her anti-Israel views were antisemitic. (They are, mostly.) Her trolling was rewarded when her social-media following tripled.

“I do not believe [MAGA is united],” Boller told Piers Morgan Monday. Americans “know that the only reason why we are even in Iran right now is because of Israel. … I’m telling you right now MAGA is dead and we will not vote for one more politician who lies to us and says ‘oh we’re gonna drain the swamp’ and ‘we’re gonna not get involved in foreign wars.’ Trump has betrayed our country and he has betrayed maga and people are livid.”

I don’t think MAGAnites actually think about why they are demoralized. I think they latch on to reasons as they become apparent to them. NBC News’ Jonathan Allen went to central Pennsylvania to talk to Trump supporters about the war and whether their support weakened in the face of high gas prices. All but one said no, but that one was a doozy. When asked what she would say to Trump, she said: “You are a worthless pile of s---”

She voted for Trump three times! Are gas prices enough to break from him so completely? Perhaps, but I think a better explanation is that she’s hearing things from inside MAGAland. You might call them the echoes of the “anti-war and anti-Israel types,” Eggers said, who have “established a beachhead in the Republican coalition.” She can’t tell a fancy TV reporter that she’s mad about Trump breaking his promise to fight the Jewish conspiracy.

But she can tell him she’s mad about the price of gas.

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