MAGA has never been anti-war
By 
I alluded briefly earlier in the week to the marks and con artists who believe that Trump is betraying his “anti-war” mandate by threatening direct attacks on Iran. As Greg Sargent observes, this has never been based on anything but cherry-picking and wishful thinking from people who reflexively blame Democrats for everything:
All this has deeply split the MAGA coalition. Carlson has denounced top Fox News figures like Sean Hannity for actively encouraging Trump to pursue “direct U.S. military involvement” abroad, slamming them as “warmongers.” In an online discussion, Carlson and Bannon argued that this threatens to drive away supporters who want to “stop the forever wars,” describing them as crucial to the MAGA coalition. And MAGA stalwarts like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene have sounded rattled as they urge Trump not to sell out MAGA here.
But how deep does this supposed antiwar sentiment really run inside MAGA?
Well, here’s a test: Republican Representative Thomas Massie on Tuesday introduced a House resolution barring Trump from entering into war with Iran without Congress’s explicit authorization. Co-sponsored by Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, this “privileged” measure will get a vote if House Speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t procedurally thwart it.
[…]
What’s more, many Democrats oppose war with Iran. As Matt Duss argues, Trump helped pave the way to this moment by withdrawing from America’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran; our intelligence services have not assessed that Iran has decided to produce nuclear weapons; and rushing into war now would be illegal and further destabilize the Mideast.
Leading Democratic officials have endorsed a similar view, and Massie’s resolution has a number of Democratic co-sponsors. Meanwhile, Senator Tim Kaine has introduced a similar resolution in the upper chamber.
Khanna says he believes that all but about 20 Democrats will support the House measure, and he hopes to keep the defections much lower (a Senate Democratic aide expects a few defections on Kaine’s resolution, as well). As Khanna put it to me, this is a test for both parties, and at bottom a test of whether we’re “going to have an antiwar party in America” at all.
So some Republicans will be needed. But how many self-described MAGA Republicans will step up?
There are reasons for skepticism. Zack Beauchamp has persuasively argued that the whole idea of Trump’s “antiwar” appeal rests on deep confusion. While Trump didn’t start major wars, he does favor targeted but extremely aggressive military violence where he perceives it as being in narrow U.S. interests (or perhaps his own). In his first term, Trump relaxed rules on drone killings and other types of protections against civilian casualties, leading both to soar.
Meanwhile, some confuse Trump’s hostility to the postwar liberal international order with an “isolationism” that eschews foreign military entanglements. But as Nicholas Grossman points out, this doesn’t reflect principled opposition to military action. It reflects Trump’s desire to shred the Western alliance and suck up to authoritarians who similarly hate that alliance, while generally undermining multilateralism and any other international frameworks he might perceive as constraining to the U.S.—and to himself.
I think this is a representative example of the kind of delusion and misdirection that caused people to argue that Trump was “anti-war” in comparison to Biden and Harris:
Trump never gave a shit about being anti-war. His whole "Kamala is going to do ww3" that the dumbest dumb dumbs perpetuated was because he likes Russia and wants Ukraine to lose.
Which Tyler also perpetuated bc he also doesn't want the US to support Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/NOesInr80S— Centrism Fan Acct (@Wilson__Valdez) June 19, 2025
It’s pretty clear that the anti-anti-Trump set 1)believed that there was an easy diplomatic solution to the Ukraine war that Biden refused to execute, 2)believed that Trump would end the war quickly, and 3)agreed with Trump on the merits that the US should stop aiding Ukraine. But “make sure Putin’s unprovoked war of aggression succeed on the terms as favorable as Russia as possible” is not actually an anti-war position.
There were also people who thought that Trump would be tougher on Netanyahu, which was based on literally nothing:
What’s amazing is that these guys never even consider the possibility that Trump just affirmatively supports what Netanyahu is doing, even though that’s where all the evidence pointed. As Sargent says, being opposed to the liberal international order is different than being opposed to brutal uses of military force, but some people can only see what they want to see.