The MAGA movement's top influencers were divided over bombing Iran until President Donald Trump did just that Saturday night.
Now, at least for the time being, the lay leaders in the president's base appear to be rallying around a position that spares Trump criticism: Direct attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities are justified, as long as American troops aren't sent into a third full war halfway around the world in the last quarter of a century.
"People don’t want an escalation where ground troops are sent in, but this is not Iraq,” said Ryan Girdusky, a Republican consultant who worked for a super PAC that backed Vice President JD Vance's 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio. Girdusky predicted the MAGA base will swing in line behind Trump.
There is little appetite at the White House or anywhere else in Washington for a ground invasion of Iran, a mountainous country in the Middle East that would be extraordinarily difficult to conquer in a conventional war.
But it's hardly unusual for the start of hostilities — the airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear-enrichment facilities were the first direct American intervention in a week-old war between Israel and Iran — to create a rally-around-the-flag effect within a president's party. What's notable is just how dramatic and speedy the turn has been from dissent to full-throated support.
"Heavy smear campaign going on right now attacking America First Patriots as ‘Isolationists,’" Jack Posobiec, a leading voice in the MAGA movement, posted earlier Saturday, before the bombings. "I hope everyone using this bad persuasion knows that it associate them with the worst Bush-era neocons," slang for the so-called neoconservative George W. Bush administration officials who pushed for war in Iraq.
Posobiec had previously warned that direct attacks on Iran would "disastrously split the Trump coalition."
But after the airstrikes, he posted what looked like a sentiment of approval.
"President Trump has clearly signaled, as he has all along, that he opposes a regime change war in Iran," he wrote. "This is about the nuclear program of Iran which he promised he would end from day one."
Posobiec was hardly alone among anti-interventionist MAGA figures in holding off on criticizing Trump after what he described as a highly successful mission that "completely and totally obliterated" Iran's ability to develop nuclear weapons.
Steve Bannon, a top adviser in Trump's first White House and host of the “War Room” podcast, made it clear in a special broadcast Saturday night that he would have preferred for Israel to take the lead in striking Iran's nuclear facilities. But he stopped short of condemning Trump for sending U.S. forces to do the job.
Instead he gave voice to the doubts some MAGA voters would have about the mission.
"A big question is going to be why Israel did not take the lead and do this. Because right now this is back to the United States," he said. "Why are we engaging in combat operations in a war that’s a war of choice?"
But he ultimately concluded that Trump would bring the MAGA movement to his own position — perhaps an indication that influencers have more to lose by opposing Trump than he does by using force in Iran.
"There are a lot of MAGA that are not happy about this," Bannon said. "I believe he will get MAGA on board for all of it. But he's got to explain exactly and go through this."
An hour after Trump addressed the nation from the White House, Tucker Carlson, the most prominent anti-strike Trump ally, had said nothing to his 16.4 million followers on X.
But Charlie Kirk, a co-founder of Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump coalition of younger conservatives, had abandoned his long-running skepticism about the wisdom of hitting Iran.
"America stands with President Trump," Kirk wrote on X.
While Democrats pushed back against Trump, over both the wisdom of the strikes and the constitutionality of attacking another sovereign country without either congressional authorization or an imminent threat to the United States, most Republicans voiced approval or met the decision with silence.
One anomaly: Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who had been working with Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., on a measure designed to prohibit Trump from using force against Iran.
"This is not Constitutional," Massie wrote on X.
