Come on now: Trump's base is not going to stop his warmongering

The idea that the faithful will leave him for attacking Iran is dubious at best.

One of the silliest widespread claims about the threat of a U.S. war with Iran, along with the notion that it might somehow be a good idea, is that any significant portion of Donald Trump’s devout following might abandon him for betraying his and their supposed antiwar principles. None of those parroting this talk seem to have noticed that it requires putting the president and principles in the same sentence.

Amid Trump’s extended, not to say careful, deliberations over the prospect of joining Israel’s assault on its longtime nemesis — “Nobody knows what I’m going to do,” he said, not excepting himself — the headlines have come to a remarkable consensus: His apparent amenability to another Middle East military misadventure has brought forth nothing less than uproar, schism and indeed civil war within his political base.

Are we really being asked to believe this?

Photo by UX Gun on Unsplash

Trump’s devotees have weathered corruption, pestilence, insurrection and countless changes of and challenges to his and their ostensibly inviolable beliefs. He’s already raised taxes and prices, shaken markets and the economy, made peace with terrorists and waged aimless warfare. His party overtly abandoned any pretense of a platform because he is its platform. And now we’re supposed to think a question of foreign policy might rend this national suicide cult asunder?

To be fair to my fellow journalists, we’ve all been trained to write down what people say. And many of Trump’s most prominent supporters, among them Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene, are avowed opponents of overseas wars who are loudly proclaiming that they wouldn’t like this one

Despite ample evidence to the contrary, they may well sincerely harbor such beliefs. But whether they do or not, they are in a hurry to make their opposition known before Trump makes his decision — because once he does, they will largely fall in line with whatever it is.

In fact, some of the isolationists sound as if they’re capitulating preemptively. “We must trust Trump in this situation,” the reactionary influencer Charlie Kirk posted on social media. And while Vice President JD Vance allowed that “people are right to be worried about foreign entanglement,” he also hastened to add that “the president has earned some trust on this issue.”

Trump, of course, hasn’t earned anyone’s trust on any issue, but he effectively has his core followers’ trust on every issue because their attachment to him is tribal, not political. We don’t need to wonder whether Iran is the exception because Trump has already taken every side of the question in the span of a few months, from trying to reinvent the nuclear deal he destroyed to publicly threatening to murder the country’s supreme leader.

While Trump produces bad ideas nearly as often as he opens his mouth, making Benjamin Netanyahu’s war ours would be so idiotic that even some of his supporters have the sense to object to it while they still can. But that doesn’t mean any of them will suddenly develop the sense to question their support for him.