MAGA Doves Learn to Love The Bomb

War, what is it good for? Exposing some hypocrisy, for starters.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

Catturd of Arabia

FOR YEARS, PRO-TRUMP INFLUENCERS have claimed that only Donald Trump will keep America out of endless wars in the Middle East. They’ve insisted that Trump’s electoral foes, from Nikki Haley to Kamala Harris, would inevitably embroil the United States in a new Afghanistan- or Iraq-style quagmire.

So when Trump announced, via a Saturday evening bleet, that he had bombed Iranian nuclear sites, it put his most vocal fans in a quandary: Should they sacrifice any sense of ideological consistency to keep supporting Trump, or should they try to maintain some sense of self-respect and dignity by criticizing the man around whom they’ve built their careers?

For most, the choice hasn’t been particularly hard. With only a few exceptions, right-wing figures who had positioned themselves against the neocon war machine suddenly discovered a new enthusiasm for American military might. And that enthusiasm only deepened as Iran’s retaliatory strikes seemed designed to de-escalate the situation and after Trump announced on Monday afternoon that there would be a ceasefire between Iran and Israel (as usual with Trump, grains of salt apply).

Well before those developments, the spin from the MAGA dove crowd was centrifuge like. Take Juanita Broaddrick, the Bill Clinton accuser who has developed a career as a Trump pundit, with 1.8 million followers on X.

“THIS IS NOT OUR WAR!” Broaddrick posted on June 12.

That was eleven whole days ago. After the bombing raid, however, Broaddrick turned into an expert on the art of war.

“No other country in the world could have carried out what occurred tonight,” she wrote. “Only the US military has this kind of weaponry.”

Broaddrick isn’t the only one catching war fever. On June 16, right-wing influencer Gunther Eagleman praised the news that Trump was considering holding back from bombing Iran. He echoed Broaddrick and others, writing that it was “not our war.”

After the bombs dropped, though, Eagleman picked up the trumpet and fifes.

“I stand with Trump, I trust Trump!” Eagleman wrote on June 22. “He made the right call.”

The flip-flops from MAGA pundits have been so plentiful that the “Thiss_You” X account has taken over the task of chronicling them. And while seismic Trumpworld changes are nothing new—as in the decision among right-wing figures that the once-heroic Elon Musk was now a villain after he attacked Trump—there’s something depressing about this episode. That might be because it offers the clearest illustration to date of MAGA figures’ unabashed willingness to abandon whatever previous positions they held in order to maintain their faith in Trump.

Consider YouTuber Benny Johnson, who has built a career as one of the president’s most over-the-top enthusiastic fans. Once a fierce critic of foreign intervention in the Middle East, Johnson decided after the bombs fell to throw his hands up and trust the plan. Call it faith not seeking understanding.

“Donald Trump has earned my respect and trust,” Johnson wrote on X on June 21. “I don’t have the intel, Trump does. I trust his team.”

Many of the explanations these MAGA doves offered for their switch turned on a distinction between a one-off air strike against targets in Iran and a larger strategic policy aimed at wholesale “regime change.” Along these lines, these previously anti-war figures argued that so long as Trump doesn’t try to overthrow the Iranian government, a couple of bombing runs doesn’t really qualify as a war. What’s a few bunker-busters between frenemies?

In his June 21 post, for example, Johnson argued that Trump would qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize as long as there’s no “regime change.”

“No destabilization, no regime change, no migrant crisis,” Johnson wrote. “Perhaps even a peace deal? Well, then give Trump the Nobel Peace Prize.”

But even that distinction began to collapse on Sunday, when Trump boasted on Truth Social that he didn’t see why regime change should be off the table. And so, naturally, the MAGA doves had to change their arguments again: Regime change is fine now, so long as Trump merely encourages it but doesn’t actively facilitate it. More broadly, a new war in the Middle East will be different from the last wars in the Middle East because Trump is too smart to do his war in the Middle East badly. Vice President JD Vance—himself a longtime skeptic of U.S. involvement in the region—summed up that defense in a Meet the Press appearance on Sunday, arguing that the difference between Trump’s involvement in Iran and previous American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that prior presidents were “dumb.”

Even Catturd, the influential X user whose posts perhaps best represent the unfiltered reasoning of the Trump base, has fallen for this. In March, Catturd posted that American regime change has always ended in “absolute disaster.” But after Trump suggested he might try to topple the Iranian government entirely, Catturd posted that Trump was only “trolling.”

The ideological battle lines became extra confused once conservative influencers began suggesting that some personalities were on the take. Meghan McCain posted vaguely on X that pundits should avoid taking pay-offs from foreign governments.

“I know people get paid by foreign countries to sell propaganda because I have been offered it myself,” she posted. “I obviously declined because I have ethics, morals and the only country I will ever be loyal to is America.”

(Despite her campaign against foreign propaganda, McCain neglected to mention that her husband, conservative writer Ben Domenech, once made tens of thousands of dollars writing articles supporting the Malaysian government.)

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AS WILD AS THESE RHETORICAL gymnastics have become are the identities of those who have chosen not to participate in them. The list of the consistent MAGA doves includes the likes of Tucker Carlson and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), both of whom have continued to criticize Trump over the bombing.

But in the larger scope of things, that’s not . . . much. And it suggests that the political threat that Trump may face over attacking Iran won’t come from within the traditional MAGA movement but from the newer people he’s brought into it. Those recent additions include bro podcasters like Joe Rogan and Theo Von, who helped Trump reach new audiences during the election. The comedians and tough guys who live in that world tend to be anti-war. They also depend on their audiences feeling that they’re authentic, which in part means they’re not tied to any political party (or, for that matter, Trump’s personal support network). Already, comedian Tim Dillon has ripped into Trump over the war and praised Carlson for opposing it.

“It’s the craziest thing ever,” Dillon said on his show. “We’re on the verge of a war with Iran. What the fuck is happening?”

No one may be straddling the confusing internal politics of Trump world better at the moment than the “Hodge Twins,” two muscled twin brothers who have become prominent conservative commentators doing little routines and reaction videos about how dumb liberals are. Their Tweedledee/Tweedledum routine has been hugely successful, earning them more than 3.4 million followers on their main YouTube account alone.

Unlike their less-shrewd peers, the Hodges appear to have figured out a platform-based way to appeal to both the pro- and anti-war elements of the Trump base. Over on X, where the audience is presumably more groyperfied and critical of Israel, they have been strongly against bombing Iran, claiming it’s been pushed by “bootlickers” and “neocons.”

But on Facebook, where the audience appears to run older and more pro-Israel, the Hodges posted a celebration of the bombing of the nuclear sites, complete with eagle and bomb emojis.

“Democrats and their media pals are scrambling, crying foul, but patriots know Trump’s keeping America and Israel safe!🙌,” their now-deleted Facebook post read.

So what do the Hodges truly believe? After pro-Israel pundits noticed they were playing both sides of the fence, the brothers blamed the Facebook post on the fact that it had been done with AI —and that they’d been “some dumb negroes” to allow it to happen (the brothers are black).

“Some of the posts on Facebook were written with chat gpt and did not match what we post on X, so we ended up looking like some retards 🤣” the pair wrote, deftly hitting the notes of seriousness and gravity that rightly accompany the launch of an American military operation in the Middle East.