MAGA Isolationists, in Their Own Words

Truth Social is an incubator of paranoid conspiracy theories about Ukraine.

(Photo Illustration by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

I’D BEEN TRYING TO UNDERSTAND the rationale for months: Why is MAGA America so opposed to U.S. support for the war in Ukraine?

At first, I thought I’d find the answer in foreign policy magazines and journals. I started reading about the history of American isolationism and parsing the speeches of politicians like Senators J.D. Vance and Lindsey Graham. I even thought I might write a journal article myself, analyzing and refuting these wrongheaded but reasonable-sounding arguments.

But all along something told me that I was barking up the wrong tree. The GOP base voters I encountered seemed so bitterly angry and so dug in—there had to be something beyond rational arguments about fiscal conservatism and comparative assessments of Chinese and Russian threats.

Then, a few weeks ago, I stumbled on a video that took my breath away. A reporter had gone to a Trump rally and wandered among the crowd asking people how they’d feel if Russia won the war, destroying Kyiv and wiping Ukraine off the map. One woman made clear she had no objection to the invasion or the killing of Ukrainians: “That’s fine,” she asserted truculently. “That’s fine with me.” An older man whose hat read “Vietnam Veteran” agreed: “I don’t think Putin’s the problem. I think Zelensky’s the problem. . . . Putin is trying to save his country from the likes of idiots like Zelensky and the elitists.” Another man in line outside the rally drove the point home: “This [Biden] administration’s trying to start a war with Russia. Russia’s not our enemy.”

What else was hiding under the rock, I wondered, and at first I was afraid to look. But then I spent a few days on Truth Social and other far-right sites. I did no systematic research—just an informal canvas of the MAGA mind. But I’ve come away far more scared than I was before about what might lie ahead for U.S. foreign policy.

One group of MAGA supporters thinks it’s all just fake news—there is no war. “I think the whole thing is fabricated,” one woman in a sequined jacket covered with MAGA insignia told a correspondent from The Daily Show. “Where is the war footage?” a conservative commentator and former Fox News producer tweeted to his 315,000 followers in February 2023, a year into the war. “This smacks of a scam.” Conservative podcaster Stew Peters echoed the sentiment, telling his 163,000 Twitter followers, “The world is a stage. It’s ALL fake.”

A second big group concedes the conflict is real but believes Ukrainians are at fault—that they started the war or are somehow so evil that they deserve the death and destruction raining down on their heads. Among this group’s wild and completely unsubstantiated beliefs: that Ukraine is killing Christians and building weapons of mass destruction.

“People are blindly supporting genocide by virtue signaling for Ukraine,” someone calling himself Redneck Patriot posted this month on Truth Social, where he has 226,000 followers. He endorsed a post by someone who goes by Shadow Defense: “If you support Ukraine, you support 1. Organ trafficking 2. Human trafficking 3. Nazis 4. Bioweapon labs 5. Money laundering for biden’s [sic].”

Still others who blame Ukraine buy Moscow’s nonsensical claim that Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s Jewish president, is a Nazi. Truth Social contributor “TrollHunter” (@Jeanette159) isn’t sure if Zelensky is a Nazi or if Ukraine is a Communist country—in fact, she thinks both are true. But either way, she’s convinced “it was Ukraine’s aggression” that started the war. Drak7 agreed: “Putin is a Patriot protecting her [sic] people only.”

A third group of MAGA supporters believes the war is Biden’s personal project—that he started it or is advancing it out of some demonic death wish. “BIDEN MAY LITERALLY CAUSE NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION UPON THE EARTH,” Maximumhaleem screamed on Truth Social.

Some—perhaps the majority of this third group—believe the president is using the war as a money-making scheme. “CROOKED Joe Biden is the REAL CRIMINAL,” wrote “MAGA America’s Ambassador” (@RobertELeedom) on Truth Social, where he has 9,000 followers. “He bought his properties by selling out America & Stealing our Tax Dollars through Ukraine Aide [sic].”

Others trace the conflict back to Hunter Biden—an elaborate conspiracy to conceal and legitimize his ill-gotten gains in Ukraine. “NO MORE MONEY LAUNDERING TO UKRAINE FOR THE BIDEN CRIME FAMILY,” “Ela The Ultra Maga Girl” posted to her 17,000 Truth Social followers.

Still a fourth group of Trump loyalists, by far the largest group, harks back to an older populist trope—a theory that explains everything and organizes their world—about elites who despise people like them and are prosecuting a war at odds with American interests.

Just who fronts for what many MAGA voters call the “globalist cabal” varies from post to post: the U.N., NATO, “the Biden Regime,” the CIA. It’s a big tent, mostly but not only Democratic. Among the alleged members singled out in the posts I read: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Biden, John Kerry, and Nancy Pelosi—but also Mitt Romney, Boris Johnson, and “elitist Zelensky” himself, who is allegedly “laughing all the way to the bank as he begs the West for more money.”

“Putin and Zelensky came to an agreement 3 weeks into this conflict,” Cape Lady (@DebGC) explains to her 4,000 followers. But “the globalists . . . intervened and they have prolonged this conflict for their own interests. These forever wars are a huge source of wealth for the bankers who fund both sides, for the corrupt politicians, and for the Military Industrial Complex that owns so many of them! It’s a win-win for them because all the deaths contribute to depopulation.”

This would sound familiar to twentieth-century isolationists Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin. They and their followers made similarly outrageous claims—about global cabals, evil capitalists, and Jewish bankers—to keep America out of a conflict building in Europe, World War II. But their dystopian fantasies were easier to counter and disprove in a time when most people would listen to a case based on agreed-upon facts.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought America to its senses and a vast populist isolationist movement—in 1939, on the eve of World War II, 84 percent of Americans thought the United States should stay out of the fight in Europe—evaporated overnight.

Who or what will be able to slay the isolationist monster that Donald Trump and his allies have created? It could be much harder this time around in an era when so few believe in the idea of truth.