‘It’s time to say no’: MAGA influencers push back on Trump on Iran

At the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans, George H.W. Bush swore an oath to his party: “Read my lips: No new taxes.“

Subscribe to read this story ad-free

Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.

He won the election. Then, he raised taxes. The move alienated Republican activists, and GOP lore has long held that he lost re-election because the broken promise tattered his relationship with the party’s base.

Now, Trump is threatening to destroy Iranian civilization after campaigning in part on a “no new wars” mantra in 2024. He has said the war is necessary to stop Iran’s leadership from obtaining nuclear weapons and further destabilizing the global order.

His reversal is creating major strains within his own “Make America Great Again” movement, evident in increasingly loud dissent from some of its most prominent media figures, resistance from a growing number of GOP lawmakers and polling.

The roster of conservative luminaries rebuking Trump over Iran this week could have been cut and pasted from a list of his most reliable supporters of the past: Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Mike Cernovich, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Turning Point USA’s former communications director Candace Owens, among many others.

“Trump would not have won the primary in 2016 had he run on Mitt Romney’s platform, nor would he have won the 2024 election by running on new wars,” Cernovich, a right-wing influencer who has promoted pizzagate and various other conspiracy theories, wrote to his 1.4 million X followers Sunday. “It’s silly to claim Trump is MAGA. He rode a cultural wave, only he had the personal will to do so, but the issues matter, too.”

In a prior post, Cernovich alleged that “Trump’s goal is to turn Iran into Syria. An unpopular war that he wasn’t able to wrap up quickly, so now he is lashing out and destroying hospitals and bridges.”

Jones and Greene have called for the Cabinet to use the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to declare Trump unable to fulfill his duties and oust him from the Oval Office.

Carlson advised Trump’s military aides to reject any plan to slaughter Iranian civilians, including through the potential use of a nuclear weapon.

“Now it’s time to say no, absolutely not, and say it directly to the president, no,” Carlson said on his podcast.

Jenna Ellis, who was an attorney for Trump’s 2020 campaign, said Trump’s Truth Social post threatening Iranian civilization read to her “like a president who feels increasingly invincible — and that should concern everyone.”

“What I saw in his first term, and what this post reinforces, is that he approaches governing the way he approached New York real estate: find the loophole, bypass the restriction, and do what you want anyway,” she told NBC News. “The rhetoric here is strikingly expansive and, at points, unmoored. When you pair that tone with an apparent belief that executive authority is unconstrained, it raises serious concerns about decision-making in one of the most volatile geopolitical contexts in the world.”

The White House did not immediately respond to an NBC News request for comment on this story. But Trump told the New York Post that he thinks Carlson, who has visited him at the White House this year, is “a low-IQ person that has absolutely no idea what’s going on.”

In a primetime speech last week — his first since the war began on Feb. 28 — Trump said the war would end “shortly” without offering any firm timeline.

“Everyone has said that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons, but in the end, those are just words if you’re not willing to take action when the time comes,” he said, later adding: “We are on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat to America and the world.”

Carlson is one of a number of conservatives who have framed their dissatisfaction with Trump in religious terms, saying the president’s words and actions fly in the face of Christianity. After Trump posted to Social Media on Easter Sunday with a profane call for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping channel for international commerce, Carlson admonished his own followers.

“Desecrating Easter was the first step toward nuclear war,” Carlson wrote on X. “Christians need to understand where Trump is taking us.”

In February, Trump’s Justice Department tried and failed to indict several Democratic lawmakers who had participated in a video cautioning military personnel to reject unlawful orders. Trump had accused the lawmakers of engaging in “seditious behavior” that could be “punishable by death.”

On Tuesday, Carrie Prejean Boller, a former model who served as a member of the Trump-appointed federal Religious Liberty Commission until February, pressed fellow Christians to stop working for Trump.

“I’m calling on every single Christian to RESIGN IMMEDIATELY from this administration,” wrote Boller, who was dismissed from the panel after a clash over the definition of antisemitism. “If you don’t,” she continued, “the blood of innocent human life is on your hands. Trump is an evil psychopath.”

For other influencers in the conservative ecosphere, criticism of the president’s approach has been more subtle. Steve Bannon, a senior White House aide in Trump’s first term and the host of the “War Room” podcast, has been all over the map on Iran.

On Tuesday, with the president’s deadline for a deal with Iran nearing and his threat of decimating that country’s critical infrastructure looming, Bannon talked about the opportunity cost of the war — asserting that the administration is taking its eye off more consequential threats from illegal immigration and China.

“What are we doing?” Bannon said on his podcast. “We’re in the Middle East, which is a side show to the side show.”

With Congress in recess and with Republicans in the chamber typically in lockstep with the president, there has been less explicit resistance from the class of elected officials. But a handful of Republicans in each chamber have said publicly that there are limits to what they are willing to support in the Iran war.

Sen. John Curtis, R-Okla., said last week that Trump should put a stop to hostilities unless he gets specific authorization from Congress, and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said on a podcast this week that he doesn’t want the U.S. to “blow up civilian infrastructure.”

At the same time, a growing number of Democratic lawmakers are calling for Trump to be removed from office, echoing some of those on the right.

While efforts to invoke the War Powers Act to end the war failed in both the House and Senate earlier this month, there has also been no movement in Congress on a formal authorization of the war or a spending package to fund it. Trump administration officials are expected to seek as much as $200 billion from Congress for the war, but they have not officially transmitted a request that would face significant obstacles to enactment.

In other words, Congress has yet to show that there are enough votes to authorize the war, to fund it or to stop it.

At the same time, Trump is seeing signs of erosion from his GOP coalition across the country. He is ineligible to run for re-election, but public approval for a president — or disapproval — can affect his ability to influence Congress, governors and foreign leaders as he attempts to advance his agenda. More crucial for the final two years of his term, Trump is also in danger of losing Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

With gas prices having risen more than $1 per gallon at the pump since the start of the war a little more than a month ago, and many Republican, Democratic and independent voters wary and weary of war, surveys are starting to show an electorate moving further away from Trump.

A Morning Consult poll released this week concluded that the president’s approval rating is in positive territory in just 17 of the 50 states. Earlier this year, that number was 22.

“Our data shows that the share of Republicans who ‘strongly approve’ of Trump dropped in every competitive Senate and House battleground this quarter,” the outlet reported. “At the same time, the share of Democrats who ‘strongly’ disapprove of his job performance increased in key states.”