Trump will not lose Maga support over bombing Iran. This is why
'I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?' Donald Trump boasted at an event in Iowa during his first campaign for president in 2016. 'It's, like, incredible.' Will he lose his Maga base after bombing Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities?
Clearly he doesn't think so. On June 19 the president told journalists: 'My supporters are for me. My supporters are America First and Make America Great Again. My supporters don't want to see Iran have a nuclear weapon.'
In the aftermath of the attack he ordered on Iran on June 21, Trump likely has Fifth-Avenue-style immunity from mutinies by most of his conservative populist supporters, in spite of their scepticism toward overseas military interventions.
He is helped by the fact that the pundits and elected representatives who claim to speak for his Maga followers do not agree. There are hawks like the TV and radio pundit Mark Levin and advocates of restraint like Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Green.
Tucker Carlson himself engaged in a harsh debate with Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz about U.S. policy toward Israel and the Middle East. Fox News leans toward the pro-war side. His former aide Steve Bannon, host of the popular podcast 'Bannon's War Room,' whom Trump invited to the White House before the attack, has urged restraint.
But even without these divisions over Middle Eastern strategy on the populist Right, Trump has little reason to fear a significant loss of support. The reason is that Maga is not a creed or a movement with many leaders who share a common and well-understood set of principles; it is a cult of personality around a single charismatic leader.
Charismatic presidents with cults of personality have existed in America's past. Their ranks include Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan. (Lincoln and Kennedy were only deified in the public mind after their assassinations).
Because he served an unprecedented four terms, FDR showed how powerful a cult of personality can be. Between his first inauguration in 1933 and his death during World War II in 1945, he abandoned or reversed policies many times. As a candidate in 1932, FDR denounced President Herbert Hoover for the 'reckless growth of government.' Once in power, however, he dramatically expanded the federal government's role in the economy and society.
He promised to keep the U.S. out of World War II but made the U.S. a de facto co-belligerent of the UK and Soviet Union even before Pearl Harbour. He was a deficit hawk at times and a deficit dove at others. He backed anti-trust reformers in the 1930s then reined in government attacks on big businesses whose help was needed during the war.
In spite of his inconsistency, FDR retained the loyalty of millions of Americans, particularly members of the working class majority.
Trump's base, like that of FDR, is found among working-class whites, along with a growing number of working-class Hispanics and blacks. They don't follow disputes about the questionable constitutionality of many of his executive orders, but they approve of his campaigns to enforce border laws and take on the oppressive woke Thought Police in their journalistic and academic bastions.
Charisma cannot be passed on when a charismatic president leaves office, as Jackson's successor Martin van Buren, TR's successor William Howard Taft, and FDR's successor Harry Truman found out. A cult of personality is a kind of celebrity worship, not a body of political or economic principles.
On May 23, at an investment conference in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, Trump echoed the themes of the anti-interventionist Right and the anti-imperialist Left while condemning previous American administrations. 'In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built. And the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.'
Now he has carried out the long-sought goal of the neoconservatives who despised him and has bombed Iran; something that even George W. Bush refused to do.
If Trump commits U.S. troops to an open-ended war with Iran, rather than limiting hostilities with Iraq to air strikes, some of his followers no doubt will defect, accusing him of betraying them by launching a new Forever War in the Middle East like Bush's Iraq war. Most of his followers, however, will stick with him – not only because of the rally-round-the-flag effect in war-time, but also because their loyalty is to him, not to a particular domestic agenda or foreign policy.
Meanwhile, conservative pundits who fear losing access and favour no doubt will try to rationalise the apparent inconsistency of his policy toward Iran shows that Trump is playing a brilliant game of three-dimensional chess – 'peace through strength,' or something like that.
In 1077, following his excommunication, Emperor Henry IV of the Holy Roman Emperor journeyed through the snow to Canossa Castle in Italy to beg forgiveness from Pope Gregory VII.
On June 18 of this year, before the bombing and after he denounced the Trump administration for being 'complicit' in Israel's attacks on Iran, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson spoke to the president. Trump told reporters: 'He called and apologised the other day because he thought he said things that were a little bit too strong, and I appreciated that.'
Following the strikes on Iran, Republican Representative Thomas Massie denounced them as unconstitutional and unnecessary: 'There was no imminent threat to the United States which is what would authorise that.' On Truth Social, his personal social media platform, Trump excommunicated him: 'Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky is not Maga, even though he likes to say he is. Actually Maga doesn't want him, doesn't know him, and doesn't respect him.'
Massie's excommunication, like Carlson's metaphorical road to Canossa, demonstrates that in the Church of Maga Donald Trump is both Emperor and Pope.
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