Trump is taking fire over ‘forever wars', but Maga's real battle awaits
'I'm the one that decides,' declared President Trump last week when asked by a reporter who gets to say what 'America First' really means. Faced with a backlash from parts of his base over the prospect of the US supporting Israel in military action in Iran, the president said his word is final — 'after all, I'm the one that developed America First' — adding that 'the term wasn't used until I came along'.
In fact, the phrase dates back to the First World War when Woodrow Wilson used the slogan to appeal to voters who wanted America to stay out of the conflict. (They didn't get their wish.) The America First Committee was founded in 1940 to protest against US involvement in the Second World War, but gained notoriety after high-profile members such as the aviator Charles Lindbergh and the automotive tycoon Henry Ford led to a perception that it had antisemitic and pro-fascist sympathies.
However, since Trump launched his first bid for president ten years ago, it has taken on a new meaning. 'He has driven the term back into usage,' says Julian Zelizer, the Princeton University historian and author of The Presidency of Donald J Trump: A First Historical Assessment. 'He has the most power to shape what it actually includes.'
• US bombs Iran: follow live reaction
Now it represents a whole movement, extending from foreign policy to trade to immigration. No more forever wars. No more favours for other countries out of the goodness of Uncle Sam's heart. But after Trump authorised US forces to bomb three nuclear sites in Iran on Saturday, bringing America into Israel's war, the question being asked in Washington: is Trump still America First? Is the president in control of the agenda — or is it the base that now owns it?
There are certainly plenty of figures in Washington who have distinct views on what America First ought to mean in practice. The row over Iran has brought a US version of blue on blue: Maga on Maga. As the alt-right influencer Jack Posobiec put it: 'I'm just thankful the neocons are here to tell us who is REAL MAGA.'
Cabinet unease
Trump has distanced himself from certain members of his cabinet, saying that his head of intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is 'wrong' on her intelligence assessment of Iran. She in turn changed tack, saying Iran could produce nuclear weapons 'within weeks' and blaming the 'dishonest media' for the confusion.
But in his second term, Trump has had ultimate authority over his cabinet. Learning from the first term, he picked them for loyalty and deference. As a figure with close ties to the administration says: 'It's a football team. He's the manager, they're the players, they listen to the manager and that's all there is to it.'
It is why the voices he needs to worry more about may be the ones on the outside. Enter the Maga-verse — the network of former advisers, informal advisers and influencers free to speak, exerting varying degrees of influence on the president.
One figure close to the White House says: 'There are a bunch of people that we look to to see how things are landing.' Indeed, the administration last week reached out to key figures as they tried to control the narrative. Now such efforts are required to contain the fallout.
There are different spheres of influence. Steve Bannon, Trump's former adviser, is widely regarded as the godfather of Maga. While he no longer has a place in the White House, he is seen as a temperature check on the movement by keeping the government in touch with the grassroots through his media and bringing up the next generation of Maga — several of whom have gone on to take jobs in the administration.
'Everybody just folds to whatever big corporate interest there is and this administration is only slightly different to that,' explains an insider. 'Steve keeps a check on it.'
Bannon's War Room podcast regularly ranks among the top ten in the US, and has more than 200,000 followers on X. The former executive chairman of the alt-right news website Breitbart had lunch with the president last week — just before Trump's spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt announced a two-week window to make a decision on his next steps in Iran.
In response to Trump's decision to strike Iran, Bannon has already sounded the alarm, saying he can get Maga on board but Trump needs to explain to the base why he is doing this. In a War Room broadcast on Saturday night, he said: 'There's a lot of Maga who are not happy about this. I'll just be blunt … We can tell this in the chats right now. A lot of the chats are saying, 'I hear you but you promised that you wouldn't do this'.'
Next, consider Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who last week accused Trump of taking America on the wrong path. This led to Trump saying: 'I don't know what Tucker Carlson is saying. Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen.'
'He's definitely relevant,' says one Maga figure. 'But it's a much younger, less-likely-to-vote demographic that he now appeals to. It's a much lower propensity voter. I don't think he would take that as an insult. He lives in a cabin in the woods in Maine.'
After the barrage of words, Trump later said he shared a phone call with Carlson who apologised for going too far.
Then there's Laura Loomer — the right-wing conspiracy theorist — who regularly leads the news in DC with her social media and investigations. Loomer has become one of Trump's biggest backers on intervention in Iran. After Trump announced the US action, she told her followers: 'Rule number 1: Never bet against Donald Trump' — before turning her fire on those in the movement who are not being sufficiently supportive.
A Republican insider says: 'She's probably the best opposition researcher in Republican politics nationwide and she's devastatingly destructive to people. Some people might walk around with their chest puffed out and go, 'Oh, I'm not scared of Laura Loomer.' They're all scared of Laura Loomer.'
The changing media landscape is giving these figures greater prominence. Matt Boyle, the Washington bureau chief at Breitbart, says: 'We live in impassioned times, especially in the podcast era and new media.'
It's not gone unnoticed in Maga world that last week streaming overtook cable and broadcast as the most-watched form of TV in the US.
Yet the base is insistent there is no civil war. 'We're not a monolith, we're not the left, they don't tolerate dissent, right?' says one Maga figure. 'One part of the coalition is holding the other part of the coalition accountable.'
Speaking ahead of the strikes, Boyle, who was recently spotted dining with both Bannon and the Democrat senator John Fetterman, said the movement would adjust to whatever the president decided: 'I do think that when the president makes his decision that the movement is gonna fall in line very quickly. He is the leader of the America First movement. He built this movement.'
Yet Trump has never been a perfect fit for some of the views within it. In 2016, he said of America First that he wanted to make decision-making more 'unpredictable'.
'We won't be isolationists — I don't want to go there because I don't believe in that,' Trump said. 'But we're not going to be ripped off any more by all of these countries.'
The historian Victor Davis Hanson, of the Hoover Institution think tank at Stanford University, says: 'Trump is neither an isolationist nor an interventionist, but rather transactional. The media fails to grasp that, so it is confused why tough-guy Trump is hesitant to jump into Iran, or contrarily why a noninterventionist Trump would even consider using bunker busters against Iran.
'The common thread again is his perception of what benefits the US middle class — economically, militarily, politically and culturally.'
But internal debates go beyond foreign affairs. The other main Maga priorities are bringing jobs back to the US — through tariffs — and cracking down on immigration. Tensions have bubbled on all of these: last week Trump exempted the farm and hospitality industries from the immigration raids, only for Maga activists to raise alarm. The president then changed it back.
Raheem Kassam, who is a close ally of Bannon, a co-owner of the Butterworths restaurant in Washington — a Maga hotspot — and a former adviser to Nigel Farage, says: 'It's definitely become more complex and thoughtful and flexible.
'There's now a depth where you can't necessarily fit all of Maga policy on a banner held up at a rally. You used to be able to say it was 'build the wall', 'drain the swamp'. It's developed more, it's deeper, it's denser and that's kind of what the establishment is really upset about this time. It's like, 'Oh, these guys have actually developed an element of political sophistication.''
For now, most agree — at least publicly — that Trump is king. Yet privately what is making the base so jumpy is this idea that Trump is being forced by the deep state into the default establishment policy position. If it happens to Trump, what chance does his successor have?
Hanson says: 'Trump decides — in the sense of le Maga état, c'est moi. Almost everyone who tried to redefine Maga or take on Trump has mostly lost rather than gained influence.
'The key question is whether Maga continues after 2029, given Trump's unique willingness to take on the left rhetorically and concretely in a way that far exceeds the Reagan revolution, and in truth, any prior Republican. Trump's bellicosity, volatility, and resilience — his willingness to win ugly rather than lose nobly — ensure him credibility and goodwill among the base that in turn allows him greater latitude and patience.'
Or as a recent visitor to the White House puts it: 'A lot of them want a Maga ideology whereas Trump is happy with it just being about him.'
Kassam adds: 'Trump does largely get to decide what America First means. But the point is, there's a whole movement behind it that will want to keep the America First agenda even after Trump.'
If the president now finds himself dragged into a longer conflict in the Middle East, his authority will be tested. Yet the the real fight to define America First is likely to come when Trump exits the stage.
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