The Iran War Is Tearing Trump’s Coalition Apart

Yet as a lame-duck president, Trump is in many ways immune to much of the pressure that would normally dog a highly unpopular leader. The war and associated inflation are likely to cost Republicans more seats in the midterms—certainly more than they might have lost otherwise—but the president faces no imminent revolt from Congress. He is remarkably unconstrained for a man who has started one of the most unpopular wars in U.S. history.

More interesting, however, is the debate about whether the president is losing his base of support. High-profile defectors such as Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene have accused the president of abandoning his supporters; hawkish Republicans, meanwhile, respond by waving polls that show strong support for the war among those who identify as “MAGA Republicans.”

But the debate about MAGA versus non-MAGA Republicans is obscuring the fact that Trump’s choice to go to war in Iran has wrecked the broader coalition that elected him. Unlike his core supporters, who will follow him through thick and thin, many in his broader coalition see the war in Iran as a broken promise. This group will continue to be influential on U.S. foreign policy going forward.

Twenty-five years of Middle Eastern “forever wars” have left the public with relatively little patience for any military campaign that doesn’t seem to be going well. And unlike many of his predecessors, Trump’s White House did nothing to sell this war to the public before it started. Even now, two months into the war, the administration remains cagey on why the conflict was necessary in the first place.

The numbers are quite consistent. Sixty-six percent of Americans disapprove of the decision to go to war, while 68 percent are opposed to the use of ground troops in Iran. Sixty-nine percent are concerned about the war’s economic impact, particularly on fuel prices, and 64 percent tell pollsters that they are not confident in the president’s ability to resolve the crisis. In a nutshell, something like two-thirds of all Americans consistently tell pollsters they don’t want this war.

Yet there’s no denying that there’s also a significant partisan split on this issue. That remaining one-third of Americans are Republican-leaning, and 77 percent of them support the war. Other polls divide up Republicans into smaller self-identified chunks, such as the 90 percent of “MAGA Republicans” who tell pollsters they support the war. And while we can certainly infer from other polling that this war wouldn’t have been their first choice—only 11 percent of Trump voters identify Iran as a top priority, while 60 percent are worried about inflation—they’re clearly still happy to get in line behind the president when it counts.

Mostly, the doubts about whether Trump’s base continues to support him arise from the soap opera-style drama playing out among right-wing media and celebrities. Podcasters like Fox News’s Mark Levin, or perennial poster Laura Loomer, have taken the opportunity to try to expel some of the war’s opponents from Trump’s orbit. There’s been an active debate on whether the late Charlie Kirk would have opposed the war were he still around.

Indeed, the president himself got in a flame war with Carlson, who said that he “felt betrayed,” and “hate this war and the direction that the U.S. government is taking.” Trump fired back, describing Carlson and other dissenters as  “not ‘MAGA,’ they’re losers, just trying to latch on to MAGA.”

Given the polling numbers, it seems that Trump might be right on this one. But MAGA is not necessarily the same thing as America First, a foreign-policy principle with which most of his key detractors in the war seemed to identify. Joe Kent, for example, who resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of the war, explicitly called out Israeli influence in his resignation letter as opposed to the principle of America First. And Chris Caldwell, a longtime defender of Trump in the public space, now argues, “The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project.”

Indeed, so-called MAGA Republicans only make up one part of the coalition that elected Trump in 2024. Different studies have tried to slice and dice this coalition in different ways. The pollster YouGov, for example, asks Republicans to self-identify as either “MAGA” or “non-MAGA” and consistently finds gaps between the two groups on foreign-policy issues. Another study by the group More in Common, meanwhile, estimates that hardcore MAGA Republicans only made up about 30 percent of Trump voters during the 2024 election.

Among other segments of Trump voters, support for the war in Iran is much lower. CNN, for example, recently highlighted an extreme swing in approval for Trump among one core demographic: white, non-college-educated voters, from over 30 percent approval in 2025 to underwater today. And support for the war clusters among older Americans, even within the Republican Party. Republicans under 30 are 30 points less likely to support the war than their older partisan counterparts.

Indeed, it’s precisely the less loyal parts of Trump’s winning coalition in 2024—non-college-educated voters, young Americans, disaffected Joe Rogan or Theo Von listeners—who are most opposed to the war. Both Rogan and Von have described the war as a betrayal of those who voted for Trump; More in Common, which describes these voters as the “reluctant right,” has polling that shows only about one-quarter of this segment of Trump’s electoral base supports the war.

In short, while it’s true that the president’s MAGA base does not appear ready to desert him over the Iran war, much of the broader coalition that elected him has already done so. And while Trump’s lame-duck status in some ways protects him from the consequences of his actions, the dissatisfaction of his broader coalition over this war should offer lessons to future Republican and Democratic candidates alike.

Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and other Republican candidates associated with this administration may struggle to distance themselves from this unpopular war in the future. For at least some Democrats, trying to stake out a middle ground (i.e., opposing the war for process reasons or voting to fund it) could also backfire. Foreign policy is rarely a top issue for voters, but some of Trump’s electoral success in 2024 was undoubtedly linked to dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s foreign policy, especially around Gaza. He has now lost much of this group; can any other politician capture it?