Saturday’s USstrikes on Iranprovoked conflicting reactions from isolationist Republicans who support Donald Trump’s Make America great again (Maga) movement, catching them – like many Democrats – between supporting efforts against nuclear proliferation and opposing American intervention in foreign conflicts.
The far-right congresswomanMarjorie Taylor Greene– a loyalist to the president – reacted to the strikes by urging those in the US to pray that terrorists do not attack “our homeland” in retaliation.
“Let us join together and pray for the safety of our US troops and Americans in the Middle East,”Greene wrote on X.
But Greene had not been so supportive in a message posted 30 minutes before Trump announced news of the surprise strikes on Saturday evening.
In that message, Greene wrote: “Every time America is on the verge of greatness, we get involved in another foreign war. There would not be bombs falling on the people ofIsraelif [its prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu had not dropped bombs on the people of Iran first. Israel is a nuclear armed nation. This is not our fight. Peace is the answer.”
The former Trump White House adviserSteve Bannon, who has been an opponent of US military intervention in Iran, hit out at the president for thanking Netanyahu in a national address shortly after the strikes.
Speaking on his War Room web show, Bannon said, “It hasn’t been lost … that he thanked Bibi Netanyahu, who I would think right now – at least the War Room’s position is – [is] the last guy on Earth you should thank.”
That came amid ongoing speculation that Trump’s decision to attack Iran’s nuclear sites on Saturday stemmed from information thatIranwas close to developing a weapon – as supplied by Israeli, and not US, intelligence sources. The issue created an apparent split between Trump and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.
The president recently criticized Gabbard and the US intelligence community, saying they were “wrong” in assessing that Iran had not taken the political step of ordering a bomb. Gabbard has denied that she and Trump were not on the same page.
Nonetheless, Bannon continued his criticism of the strikes, saying: “I don’t think we’ve been dealing from the top of the deck.”
The former White House adviser also criticized Trump for leaving open the possibility of further US strikes if Iran fails to capitulate to US demands. “I’m not quite sure [it was] the talk that a lot of Maga wanted to hear,” he said. “It sounded … very open-ended.”
Days earlier, amid signs of a Maga rebellion against the administration’s increasingly hawkish stance on Iran, Bannon told an audience in Washington that bitterness over the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a driving force for Trump’s first presidential victory. “One of the core tenets is no forever wars,” Bannon said.
Bannon, though, said “the Maga movement will back Trump” despite its opposition to military interventions.
But there are now signs that the Maga “America first” isolationist position may be more amenable to limited airstrikes. The administration has stressed that Saturday’s raids only targeted Iran’s nuclear enrichment and not manufacturing locations, population centers or economic assets, including the oil terminal at Karg island.
The far-right influencer Charlie Kirk had warned of a Maga divide over Iran, saying “Trump voters, especially young people, supported [him] because he was the first president in my lifetime to not start a new war.”
Yet on Sunday,Kirk reposted a clip ofan interview with JD Vance on Meet the Press in which the vice-president praised the B-2 pilots from Missouri who carried out the previous day’s bombing.
“They dropped 30,000 pound bombs on a target the size of a washing machine, and then got back home safely without ever landing in the Middle East,” Vance said in the clip. “Whatever our politics, we should be proud of what these guys accomplished.”
In that interview, Vance suggested Trump had “probably” decided by mid-May that the diplomatic process with Iran was “not going anywhere”. But Vance refused to be drawn on when precisely Trump approved the strike, saying it probably came “over time”.