The most dangerous battle facing Trump isn't in Iran
It had the feel of two ageing dons sparring in the senior common room, both smugly full of self-admiration with their own cleverness. This was the encounter between two of MAGAs leading intellectual apostles: Senator Ted Cruz from Texas (Princeton University and Harvard Law) and one-time Fox News host, unrivalled leader in white grievance politics and influential beyond justification, Tucker Carlson.
There was an 'en garde' – and from there they parried and counter-parried in an interview broadcast this week. There was the occasional lunge as the two 50-somethings engaged in their dialectic on the wisdom or otherwise of Donald Trump allowing the US to become dragged into the Iran / Israel conflict.
It has been one of the articles of faith, one of the foundational beliefs of the MAGA movement that America should not be the world's policeman – although the isolationist, pull-up-the-drawbridge, let the rest of the world get on with it school of thought is nothing new.
There's always been that strand to American thought, even if Donald Trump is shouting it more loudly. There is also a more practical, realpolitik side to it in Trump's mind. Put simply, what good did it ever do a president? LBJ felled by Vietnam; Bush 43 and his neocon Iraq misadventure; Biden and the calamitous Afghan withdrawal. In Trump's mind nothing positive ever comes of it, so why go there in the first place.
For all the lofty words between messers Cruz and Carlson the row boils down to this. According to Carlson, if America First means anything it requires you staying out of other people's wars. Meanwhile, Ted 'yeah, but' Cruz's view was Iran is a menace, we like Israel, they are our ally and we have to be on their side – and the clincher: the mullahs in Tehran had earlier made clear they wanted to assassinate Trump, so America does have a dog in the fight.
It is a fault line that is running through MAGA. And where the president, who just celebrated his 79th birthday with a military parade in Washington, is seemingly treading tentatively. Leave aside the paradox of Trump wanting a military parade for an armed forces he never wants to use (except maybe for vanity parades through the centre of DC, or to deploy for civil protests in California), the acolytes are picking up their ideological swords and clashing with each other over whether to send a B-2 bomber from the US airbase at Diego Garcia armed with a MOP, a 30,000 pound 'Massive Ordnance Penetrator' strapped to the undercarriage to bomb Iran's nuclear site buried deep in the mountains.
Trump has said he will decide in the next two weeks if the US will get directly involved in supporting Israel's attacks.
The most interesting intervention has come from the vice president, JD Vance, who is seen as an arch proponent of isolationism. Of course, he has to do the president's bidding – but his was a carefully argued case on X (if anything be carefully litigated on X). His argument was that if Iran was only interested in civil nuclear power, why did it need to enhance uranium to the levels they were doing. And therefore if Iran got hold of a nuclear weapon, just think what a menace they would be to American interests in the Middle East.
Understandably, around the world the question of whether the US will get involved in attacking Iran is garnering all the headlines headlines – it could be the most consequential decision of Trump's second term. But within the US there is another foundational argument about the core principles of MAGA roiling the populist right. And it's over illegal immigration.
Go to more out less any restaurant in the US and you will find there are two classes of servers. There are the waiters and waitresses who will take your food order – and in Washington they are invariably college kids, and in New York out of work actors. And then there is the lower strata of plate clearers and water glass fillers. And they are more often than not Hispanic.
It is the same in garden work or road construction. Likewise hotels. And in the fruit basket of California – the central belt – almost all the fruit is picked by Latinos. A huge percentage of these workers are 'illegals', totally in the crosshairs of Trump's promise to purge the US of this shadow workforce.
The problem is – just like over whether to bomb Iran – ideological purity is banging its head against practical politics. Trump this week told his immigration chief to ease off the gas when it comes to deporting hotel workers and those in the fields and those clearing the plates. Why? Because a lot of these industries would collapse without the plentiful supply of cheap immigrant labour. And Trump's wealthy friends with hotel chains and big agriculture interests have told him so. Cue MAGA divisions over whether the president is going soft and betraying his promises.
All of which brings us to the president himself. The Iran decision is weighing heavily. He has given himself a two-week window to make his call. But to those who question his MAGA bona fides he more or less said this: I invented it, I decide what it means – and anyway my base loves me more than it ever did.
All of which could lead one to the uncomfortable conclusion, that the real battle for Trump is at home, not Iran.
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Daily Mail
16 minutes ago
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Pentagon insider: Trump's only option to obliterate Iran's deadly labs
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Daily Mail
16 minutes ago
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Opinion: I know why Trump has decided to destroy Iran's threat
I am safely back on US soil after a harrowing trip to the Middle East last week, when I witnessed the first days of Israel 's justified war against the Islamic Republic of Iran , the wellspring of worldwide terrorism. The experience solidified my belief, more than ever before, that President Donald J Trump's commitment to preventing the mullahs of Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon is not only critical for peace in the region but for the preservation of Western Civilization. We win… or else. From Tiberias on the shore of the Sea of Galilee to Jerusalem, I watched dozens of Iranian missiles in Israeli skies, triggering the Iron Dome missile defense system, which picked off and destroyed many of the missiles before they could strike their targets. But a few bombs did get through, killing at least 24 people and wounding many more. This week, an Iranian missile struck a hospital in southern Israel that had, thankfully, largely been evacuated. Iran's response to Israel's strikes on its nuclear facilities, military and leadership is sinister in one telling way: Israel targets Tehran's military. Tehran targets Israel's civilians. And with every Iranian missile I saw, I thought: 'Boy, I'm glad that thing doesn't have a nuclear warhead on it.' In those observations lie the great question for President Trump: Should the United States allow a radical dictatorship that seeks to kill innocents, fund terrorism and lead its followers in chants of 'Death to America' possess a nuclear weapon? The answer is quite obviously 'Hell no!' Does any sane person doubt that the Iranian regime, which refers to Israel as the 'Little Satan' and the US as the 'Great Satan,' would kill Americans? Indeed, they have for decades, targeting US soldiers and citizens through their various terrorist proxies. Over one thousand American deaths, in fact, are attributable to the brutal regime. And we must never forget that while the Iranian nuclear weapons program is clandestine, their intercontinental ballistic missile program is not. The regime parades these long-range weapons through their streets, and these missiles are designed to reach the American homeland. 'For 40 years they've been saying death to America, death to Israel, death to anybody else that they didn't like,' President Trump said on Wednesday, 'They were schoolyard bullies… This is just not a threat you can have, and we've been threatened by Iran for many years.' Amen. President Trump has long held this position, consistently and unequivocally – and it's one of the many reasons that I voted for him three times. Now, I am of course aware of the voices on the right arguing against any intervention. The sentiments range from pure isolationism to some bizarre sympathy for Iran and hate for Israel. Many have exposed their ignorance by asking: 'What has Iran ever done to us?' proving that there is such a thing as a stupid question. But Trump, and Trump alone, decides what it means to be 'America First.' And the vast majority of the MAGA movement will support the president if he decides to move against Iran, which does not have to include putting 'boots on the ground' in Iran. Trump is not an isolationist, despite some of his supporters trying to impute this idea to him in desperate social media posts. The president has always been for smart engagement, but that doesn't mean no engagement. What's more, public opinion firmly supports Trump intervening in this situation. Polling explored by CNN this week tells the tale: 83 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats oppose Iran obtaining nuclear weapons. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans support U.S. airstrikes to stop Iran's nuclear ambitions. For decades, Western leaders have tried to bribe (looking at you, President Obama), coax, or flatter the Iranian mullahs into abandoning their nuclear ambitions. All that failed, because they are fundamentalist radicals who aren't motivated by conventional diplomacy. What did work? Israel's ruthless post-October 7 dismantling of Iran's terrorist infrastructure in the Middle East. Today, the Iranian terror network — from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis — has been decimated. This provides the opportunity to confront Iran without having to simultaneously fight a multi-front war against its terrorist proxies. And President Trump's strategic posture has made this moment possible. Let's be honest – he was cheated out of the Nobel Peace Prize following the signing of the 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. And in the five years since, America has courted Saudi Arabia to join the agreement. It was the most significant step towards defusing the Middle East powder keg in decades. Just imagine today's conflict without such alliances? Also in 2020, President Trump ordered the US military to kill the 'Butcher of Iran' Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force, which is responsible for operating their terrorist minions. President Trump reinstated sanctions on Iran when others begged for lenience. And he has backed Israel unequivocally while social media's keyboard warriors argued for him to abandon our special partner (we'll have to explore the thinly veiled hatred for Israel and the Jewish people in another column but my goodness is it ugly). Trump's 'America First' foreign policy rests on a simple moral premise: peace through strength, deterrence through certainty. This is now a once-in-a-generation chance to finish this fight by striking Iran's Fordow nuclear enrichment facility, which is a fortress buried deep in the mountains, designed precisely to survive such a strike while enriching uranium to weapons-grade. Destroying Fordow would not be an unprovoked escalation — it is self-defense, a clear signal that there is a price for threatening the civilized world and plotting genocide while crying victim to journalists. It is a righteous act that would protect millions of innocent lives from future war and weaken every tentacle of Iran's terror empire. This is a chance not just to make the region safer, but to restore true American deterrence — the kind that makes bad actors think twice before threatening our citizens and our friends.
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