Cult of Personality

One does not normally cite Marc Thiessen but I do enjoy watching him dance on the grave of the idea that MAGA! is in any way pacifist…

As President Donald Trump was making his final decision to launch a U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear program, Washington has been abuzz over suggestions that his MAGA movement is “splintering” over his determination to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Sorry, but that is fake news.

As the president put it in the Oval Office last week, “My supporters don’t want to see Iran have a nuclear weapon.” As usual, Trump understands his base better than both his critics and sycophants. A new poll from the Ronald Reagan Institute, taken just before the U.S. and Israel launched military strikes on Iran, shows that 90 percent of self-identified MAGA Republicans say that “preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon is important to U.S. security” — including 74 percent who say doing so matters “a great deal.”

Only 8 percent disagreed.

Polling is all over the place, but in general it seems that MAGA is more or less coming into line. The upside of this is the quick dispelling of the notion that either MAGA or Trump in any way represented “antiwar” or “restraint” positions.

As others have observed the Trump campaign really did manage to capture the “antiwar” space during the 2024 campaign. How did this happen? Coalitional dynamics are the biggest reason. The Democratic Party really has not become “pro-war” over the past sixteen years in any meaningful policy sense. Barack Obama committed force far more reluctantly than his successor (how many people remember that it was actually Trump who first bombed Syria?), ended direct US involvement in the Iraq War, and (eventually) drew down US forces in Afghanistan. Joe Biden withdrew from Afghanistan and avoided direct intervention in either the Israel-Hamas or the the Russia-Ukraine Wars. And yet it cannot be denied that the left side of the coalition consistently characterized the Democratic foreign policy elite as being more hawkish than it actually was. The foreign policy differences between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were significant, but much smaller than between Clinton and Trump. The differences between Sanders and Biden were considerably smaller than those between Clinton and Sanders.

And yet… the intra-coalitional vitriol on foreign policy is poisonous. It’s a media environment in which a lot of material is being generated that cagey folks can take advantage of it. This isn’t just Gray Zone. We should remember that until just a few short years ago it was literally the quasi-editorial position of a major left wing American magazine that it was impossible for Russia to perpetrate aggression against any of its neighbors. The very idea that Russia might have interfered (however ineffectually) in the 2016 election infuriated the left side of the coalition almost as much as it infuriated Trump, largely because it was seen as a substitute for real reform. Even today lefty pundits can remain in the good graces while insisting that Biden provoked the Russia-Ukraine War and was a primary obstacle to ending it. And of course MAGA got assists from every lefty grifter insisting that Trump was somehow going to be better for Palestine than Genocide Joe.

And this point is worth trying to answer, because some of the differences are substantive and meaningful and difficult to reconcile. Purely as an electoral strategy Joe Biden’s Palestine strategy was intelligible from the point of view of coalition politics, if nothing else. Any decision made after 10/7 was going to risk shearing off part of the coalition, and the risks had to be assessed judiciously. We’ll never know if other choices might have worked better in this regard. But you can hardly fault the left for being unhappy about how this played out. To a less divisive extent the same can be said of Ukraine. In general, the left side of the Democratic coalition did not win the kinds of personnel battles in foreign policy that it won on other kinds of policy during the Biden administration, and that both Biden and Harris were more hawkish in rhetoric than in practice. But while we cannot fault the unhappiness, we surely can fault the message, which was completely out of proportion to the actual policy differences in question.

As a broad-based governance coalition the Democrats are naturally more prone to wedges that the GOP, even before the Republicans adopted the Cult of Personality strategy to smooth the edges. The Democratic Coalition grows and wins by absorbing Groups and allowing them to persist more or less intact, as opposed to the Republicans who try to achieve real ideological fervor. And for all the idiotic arguments we see here and elsewhere that outreach to GOP voters (including, in some cases, anyone who has ever voted for Trump, even once), the GOP is not now and has never been shy about closely observing intra-left debates and trying to detach or demobilize one or more of the Groups. This tendency has been reinforced by Intensely Online Trumpism, which values trolling and conflict generation as an art. As I’ve said on Bluesky, the Trump Coalition is happy to have a first generation unionized Latino who lives with six undocumented relatives as long as he hates trans folks, and a lesbian trans woman who owns a curiosity shop in a Cincinnati suburb as long as she hates immigrants. They really do pay attention to intra-left debates and try to take advantage of possible wedge issues, and the hawkish foreign policy issue was definitely a wedge they could take advantage of, especially coming on the heels of the defeat and dismemberment of the Neocons. Stories about how Kamala was intending to conscript young men and send them to fight in Ukraine became currency in the Manosphere. This had consequences both during the election and after. The “Actually, USAID is just imperialism, the highest form of capitalism,” message is the one that got picked up and used to effect by Elon and his acolytes.

The other notable aspect of this comes from the think tank world. Most think tanks have a lean but try to avoid obvious partisanship, both for financial purposes and to maintain media credibility. The think tank world exchanges personnel freely with government and almost all of these folks know each other in some fashion. The idea of Influence is extremely attractive from both an individual and an organizational perspective. In this context it simply won’t do for most career think-tankers to bitterly denounce one party or another and then endure lean winters while that party is in power. With Trump happy to make “Restraint” themed noises, the potential for opportunity abounded, which by consequence made folks reluctant to call out the obvious bullshit in Trump’s broader program. This was true of the think tank community generally, even setting aside the obviously pernicious efforts of the Quincy Institute to describe Democrats as warmongers in an effort to become the premier MAGA FP policy shop.

So… there’s a lot of reasons why Trump was able to run as an anti-war candidate, and only a few of them have anything to do with the actual policies pursued by Democratic elected officials. The GOP did an excellent job of assessing and taking advantage of the media landscape in order to push a narrative that was appealing, but absurd. It had an assist from both the elite foreign policy community and from the less disciplined members of the Democratic coalition. There’s no obvious solution other than to recognize the problem and let Trump bomb his way out of the rhetorical space that he’s seized, although it would be ideal if people who should know better wouldn’t let themselves become preoccupied by intra-coalitional fights.