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Donald Trump’s war in Iran has sparked discord among elected Republicans, MAGA influencers, and other conservative elites. But in a development you might not have seen coming, his ceasefire appears to be even more divisive.
It wasn’t always this way. In an ironic twist, some of the president’s harshest conservative critics have been among the loudest cheerleaders for the conflict he started. Mike Pence, Trump’s first-term vice president who ran against him in 2024 after saying Trump “should never be president again,” now calls attacking Iran “one of the things I give President Trump great credit for.” John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser before turning on him, has urged Trump to stay the course, arguing in the Wall Street Journal last month that “the logic of regime change is inexorable.” National Review’s Noah Rothman, who regularly criticizes Trump, has defended the war against naysayers who think it’s gone badly and defended the president against liberals who say Trump’s threats to end Iranian civilization amounted to a war crime.
Many of the MAGA-aligned politicians and pundits who tend to support virtually everything Trump does, meanwhile, have splintered. Some, like Sen. Lindsey Graham and the radio host Mark Levin, have backed the president’s aggression to the hilt (and reportedly encouraged it behind the scenes). Others, like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have accused Trump of breaking his campaign pledge not to start new overseas wars, with escalating harshness. A handful, like Reps. Nancy Mace and Anna Paulina Luna, have vented their frustration with the administration’s approach to Iran while letting the man who leads that administration off the hook.
But the tenuous ceasefire Trump agreed to on Tuesday has scrambled those conservative battle lines once again, and the intramural tensions have only grown as Iran and Israel have tested over the past few days what this ceasefire actually means. So while the fighting may be largely on pause, at least for now, the intra-GOP civil war is only heating up.
Some of the war’s more hawkish proponents have flipped from supporting Trump’s Iran approach to opposing it. “Tehran pursuing nuclear weapons, strengthening its widespread terrorist networks, and fortifying itself in ways proves its determination to be the Middle East’s supreme power,” Bolton wrote on X on Thursday. “The current ‘cease fire’ in the Gulf changes none of this.” (To be fair, Bolton has been skeptical since the start of the war that Trump was willing to wage war on Iran the “right” way—meaning the way Bolton wants.) Rothman all but declared the armistice a failure, urging Vice President J.D. Vance and Trump’s other envoys traveling to Pakistan for negotiations with Iran on Saturday to “be willing to walk.” Pence was more diplomatic on Fox News this week, praising Trump for “a brilliant campaign” before slipping in the knife—and appearing to call for a military escalation beyond what the U.S. has engaged in so far. “If this ceasefire fails, and it looks like Iran has already violated the ceasefire now, I think not only should we continue to hit and degrade their military capability to project force externally, but I think we need to continue to double down on taking down their domestic forces that threaten their own people,” Pence said.
Some of the criticism may be filtering up to the president, who has grumbled that Iran is still throttling most shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. “That is not the agreement we have!” he protested on Truth Social on Thursday. Yet even when Trump was singing the ceasefire’s praises as “a big day for World Peace,” several otherwise staunchly MAGA Republicans were balking. “The supposed negotiating document, in my view, has some troubling aspects, but time will tell,” Graham wrote ominously on X, adding that he wanted Vance and the other “architects of this proposal” to testify to Congress about it. “This isn’t anything to write home about,” the conspiracy-minded and Islamophobic Trump confidante Laura Loomer posted this week, calling the talks with Tehran “a negative for our country.” Levin, who took incoming from fellow MAGA-aligned commentators for sticking by the president after the war began (including derogatory comments by former Fox host Megyn Kelly about the size of Levin’s manhood), sounded a similar note on Sean Hannity’s Fox show. After some obligatory throat-clearing extolling Trump’s leadership, Levin argued that Iran “has shown for half a century that every deal it signs, it violates. So what’s gonna be different this time?” Even Fox’s normally Trumpy morning show, Fox & Friends, took the president to task for letting up without checking off many of his stated goals for the war. “We have not reached any of these objectives,” co-host Lawrence Jones said, reading from a list that included dismantling Iran’s nuclear facilities and crippling its ballistic missile program.
Some MAGA lawmakers who have warned against getting dragged into another Middle Eastern quagmire have hailed the ceasefire, apparently in hopes that it will end the war for good. Mace posted that it was time to “bring our troops home,” while Luna wrote that “PEACE WILL ULTIMATELY PREVAIL.” There is, of course, no guarantee the truce will hold that long. But even if it does, the ceasefire so far seems to have failed to mollify the anti-war critics on the right who have spoken out most directly against Trump himself. Kelly, who called Trump’s Tuesday threat to end Iranian civilization “completely irresponsible and disgusting,” also blasted the ceasefire on her podcast, describing some of its apparent provisions as “amazing for Iran.” Other onetime supporters seem unmoved by the prospect of the war ending. Greene criticized Israel for continuing to bomb Lebanon this week—“So was there ever really a ceasefire?” she wondered on X. More personally, Greene wrote on Thursday that Trump had “gone mad” after Trump posted to Truth Social that Greene was a “traitor” and Kelly was “stupid.” As the right-wing pundit Sohrab Ahmari wrote of Trump’s “mad-king governance” this week, “One yearns to cry out: Bring back Hillary, bring back the Obamaian wonks, give us a thousand interagency briefing memos and think-tank white papers—policy formed in the pre-populist age may have been bad, but it wasn’t this bad.”
Where will all this conservative tumult, first over the war and now over the ceasefire, lead? Trump has, after all, pulled the rug out from under MAGA before only for his supporters to find a way to stumble back to their feet, and the vast majority of Republican voters and elected officials continue to support the war. Still, there are risks to this degree of whipsawing, even for a president with so loyal a base. It’s true that MAGA has, for more than a decade, followed Trump wherever he has led. But at least on Iran, it’s not been remotely clear where he’s leading. The inconsistencies of Trump’s approach—threatening to destroy Iran one day, proposing to administer the Strait of Hormuz with it as a “joint venture” the next—make it hard for even his most obsequious supporters to know what to cheer for. The confusion over what exactly Trump has agreed to hasn’t helped. Iranian state media this week published a list of 10 demands that it claimed Trump had pledged to use as a basis for negotiation, which the White House denied without providing an alternate list.
Even for allies who have stuck with Trump thus far, there are signs that the gulf between what he says and what’s actually happening may be growing too wide to bridge. On Hannity’s show, Levin pointedly contradicted Trump’s repeated claim that the war has already achieved “regime change” in Iran. “The fundamentals are still there, and some strongman will rise to the top as they always do,” Levin said. MAGA-aligned actors who do have convictions of their own, meanwhile, have taken advantage of Trump’s mixed messaging to push their own agendas. Loomer, for whom hating on the ceasefire may be partly an outgrowth of anti-Muslim bigotry, sounds like she’s trying to scuttle it. “So much for a ceasefire,” she wrote on X on Thursday after the account associated with Iran’s new supreme leader vowed that his country wouldn’t “allow the criminal aggressors who attacked our country to go unpunished.” Graham, whose anti-Iran hawkishness likely magnified Trump’s own, posts as though he and Trump are of one mind. The president “is right to have a red line when it comes to Iran enriching uranium,” Graham wrote this week, even though it’s unclear whether Trump will actually enforce that red line in negotiations, given that he so far hasn’t on the battlefield. Trump’s erratic approach has contributed to an environment in which Republicans who disagree with or doubt the ceasefire can point to the president’s own words to undermine it, which in turn risks sowing more discord with the MAGA faction that supports it.
None of this means, of course, that MAGA is finished. As Kelly herself said earlier this week, “Trump could drop a nuke and I’d still vote Republican over Democrat.” But the mailed glove of Trump’s iron-fisted control over his party has often been the assent of allied elected officials and media figures who have given cover to the president, provided ammunition for his followers to defend his actions, or bullied wayward Republicans into toeing his line. Trump’s current zigzagging—undermining allies who bought into his earlier arguments for the war while failing to satisfy those who opposed it from the start—risks leaving none of these mic-ed up conservative elites happy. And when no one is happy, everyone becomes a critic.
