A potential strike on Iran tests Trump's propensity to play to both sides
Since his first campaign for president 10 years ago, Trump has excelled at appearing to favor both sides of the same issue, allowing supporters to hear what they want to hear, whether he's talking about tariffs, TikTok, abortion, tax cuts, or more.
But the prospect that the United States might join Israel in bombing Iran is testing his ability to embrace dueling positions with little to no political cost. Some of Trump's most ardent supporters — those who defended him during multiple investigations and ultimately returned him to the White House — are ripping one another to shreds over the idea and at times lashing out at Trump as well.
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The war in Iran is exactly the kind of Middle East entanglement that Trump's anti-interventionist base believed he was bitterly opposed to, because he repeatedly said he was. But he is also the same president who, in his first term, authorized missile strikes in Syria, after its leadership used chemical weapons on citizens, and the assassination of a top Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani — two actions he took pride in.
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To Trump, the contradictions are not actually contradictions.
'I think I'm the one that decides that,' he told The Atlantic recently in response to criticism from one of his most vocal anti-interventionist supporters, Tucker Carlson, who said the president's support for Israel's fight in Iran ran against his 'America First' message.
Trump was propelled to victory in the Republican primary in 2016 as an outsider, in part because he forcefully condemned the invasion of Iraq, authorized by the last Republican president more than a decade before, and the seemingly endless war that followed. Yet he said the United States should have taken the country's oil, and ran radio ads saying he would 'bomb the hell' out of the Islamic State group.
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He has said he wants to renew the tax cuts he put into effect in his first term, which saved some of the wealthiest earners millions, while also suggesting that congressional Republicans should implement a new tax on the wealthiest.
He has said he supports businesses and also wants to deport the immigrant workforce that fuels parts of the economy. He wants to engage in mass deportation and also wants to sell visas for $5 million. He has celebrated the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade as a point of pride while also condemning Republican governors who signed bills banning most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
He has both celebrated and criticized his own criminal justice reform bill of 2018.
Despite the contradictions, Republicans for years have been united in support of Trump and what he says he wants, giving him a benefit of the doubt that few, if any, career politicians have ever received. Even when most elected Republicans held Trump at a distance after the deadly attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump still had a tight grip on Republican primary voters.
Trump, a celebrity known to the electorate for decades, has obscured long-standing and unresolved foreign policy divisions within the party dating back to the aftermath of President George W. Bush's push to invade Iraq.
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But as Trump decides whether to plunge the United States into the heart of the Israel-Iran conflict, his core supporters are splintering.
Trump's announcement Thursday that he could take up to two weeks to decide did not sit well with some of his most hawkish supporters. On social media, Fox News host Mark Levin began a lengthy post by suggesting that the president was being pulled back from what he actually wants to do. 'LET TRUMP BE TRUMP!' Levin wrote. 'We got our answer. Iran says no unconditional surrender. Again. And again. And again. They cheat and lie and kill. They're TERRORISTS!'
His anti-interventionist supporters, meanwhile, have been equally alarmed by what he might decide to do. 'Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA,' Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, posted on social media over the weekend.
Trump's advisers say that on the Israel-Iran conflict in particular, the president is dealing with a fast-moving, complicated situation that does not lend itself to simple, black-and-white solutions, despite the fact that he has consistently campaigned that way.
'President Trump considers the nuances of every issue but ultimately takes decisive action to directly benefit American families,' said Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson. 'The American people trust this president to make the right decisions,' she said, adding that he 'started the Make America Great Again movement because he represents a new leadership that puts Americans first.'
But in 2025, Trump is not the only one who can command media attention.
Carlson is no longer on Fox News, but he has a show that streams on the social platform X and is a leading voice among foreign policy 'restrainers' who have argued that Trump would be acting against his own movement should he strike Iran.
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Steve Bannon, an adviser who was exiled from the White House in the first year of Trump's first term, has become one of the dominant voices among the MAGA faithful with his 'War Room' podcast, delivering the same message as Carlson.
Yet Trump has found that many of his allies will ultimately come back to him, despite unhappiness with some of his decisions.
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10 minutes ago
- Yahoo
‘Always a peacemaker': How Trump decided to hold off on striking Iran
By most accounts, President Donald Trump's attention for the past week has been consumed by the spiraling crisis playing out between Israel and Iran. In between meetings in Canada on Monday, he peppered aides for constant updates. He has spent more time in the basement Situation Room this week than at any point so far in his new presidency. So it was somewhat jarring Wednesday when the president emerged from the South Portico — not to provide an update on his crisis consultations, but to oversee the installation of two nearly 100-foot flagpoles. 'These are the best poles anywhere in the country, or in the world, actually. They're tapered. They have the nice top,' the president told a clutch of reporters and workmen. 'It's a very exciting project to me.' The break from his Iran meetings lasted about an hour, a moment for the president to literally touch grass on the South Lawn amid the most consequential period of decision-making of his term so far. A day later, the president decided not to decide. He dictated a statement to his press secretary Karoline Leavitt announcing he would hold off ordering a strike on Iran for up to two weeks to see if a diplomatic resolution was possible. The decision was revealed after another meeting in the Situation Room, where the president has spent much of this week reviewing attack plans and quizzing officials about the potential consequences of each. After steadily ratcheting up his martial rhetoric – including issuing an urgent warning to evacuate the 10 million residents of Iran's capital – Trump's deferment provides the president some breathing room as he continues to work through options presented by his military officials over the past several days. It also allows more time for the divergent factions of his own party to make their case directly to the president for and against a strike, as they have been urgently doing since it became clear Trump was seriously considering dropping bombs on Iran's nuclear facilities. The president has refused to pick a side in public and spent the last week alternating between militaristic threats issued on social media and private concerns that a military strike he orders could drag the US into prolonged war. Around the Situation Room table, he has relied principally on his CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine to discuss his options, according to people familiar with the matter. His foreign envoy Steve Witkoff has been corresponding with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to determine if room exists to restart the diplomacy that had been deadlocked before Israel began its campaign last week. Other officials have been publicly sidelined. Twice this week, Trump has dismissed assessments previously offered by his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard about the state of Iran's program to develop a nuclear weapon. Gabbard testified in March that the US intelligence community had assessed Iran was not building such a weapon; Trump flatly and publicly disputed that Friday. 'Well then, my intelligence community is wrong,' Trump told reporters in New Jersey, asking the reporter who in the intelligence community had said that. Told that it was Gabbard, Trump responded, 'She's wrong.' Yet as he weighs taking action that could have consequences for years to come, Trump appears to be relying mostly on his own instincts, which this week told him to hit pause on ordering a strike that could alter global geopolitics for years to come. When top national security officials told Trump during a meeting at Camp David earlier this month that Israel was prepared to imminently strike inside Iran, it wasn't necessarily a surprise. Trump's advisers had been preparing for months for the possibility Israel could seize upon a moment of Iranian weakness — its regional proxies have been decimated over the past year — to launch a direct assault. Trump's team arrived at Camp David having already drawn up options for potential US involvement. According to people familiar with the matter, his advisers resolved differences between themselves in advance before presenting possible plans to the president. From the mountainside presidential retreat, Trump also spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who told the president he intended to begin a campaign in Iran imminently. Ten days later, with the Israeli campaign now in full swing, Trump was meeting in Canada with top American allies from the Group of 7, who hoped to decipher from him what the American plan was going forward. In closed-door meetings, leaders from Europe tried to ascertain whether Trump was inclined to order up a US strike on Fordow, the underground nuclear facility that has been the focus of attention for American war planners, western officials said. They also tried to convince a begrudging Trump to sign on to a joint statement, which urged that 'the resolution of the Iranian crisis leads to a broader de-escalation of hostilities in the Middle East.' Trump did not reveal his hand, either in private sessions with individual leaders or over dinner at the Kananaskis Country Golf Course, the western officials said. Instead, he left the summit early, leaving his counterparts in the Canadian Rockies and returning to Washington to deal with the matter himself. By midweek, with only vague signs from Iran that it was willing to restart talks, Trump's patience appeared to wearing thin for finding a diplomatic solution. And many of his allies believed he was on the verge of ordering a strike on Iran. 'It's very late, you know?' he said at Wednesday's flagpole event, the heat causing his forehead to glisten. 'It's very late to be talking.' In private meetings that day, Trump appeared convinced of the necessity of taking out the Fordow facility, according to people familiar with the conversations. And he said in public only the United States has the firepower to do it. 'We are the only ones who have the capability to do it, but that doesn't mean I am going to do it,' Trump said after coming back inside from his flag raising. 'I have been asked about it by everybody but I haven't made a decision.' He was speaking from the Oval Office, where he'd gathered players from the Italian soccer club Juventus to stand behind him. They mostly acted as a fidgeting backdrop to Trump's question-and-answer session on his Iran decision-making. At one point, Trump turned to the players amid a discussion of the B-2 stealth bomber — the only jet that could carry a bunker-busting bomb to destroy Iran's underground enrichment facility. 'You can be stealthy — you'll never lose, right?' he asked the team members, none of whom responded. 'It was a bit weird. When he started talking about the politics with Iran and everything, it's kind of, like… I just want to play football, man,' one of the players, Timothy Weah, said afterward. Amid the string of events, Trump continued to weigh the choices in front of him, and remained worried about a longer-term war. And he continued to receive messages from all sides of his political coalition, which has been divided over the wisdom of launching a strike that could embroil the US in a war for years to come. He's taken repeated calls from GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a prominent voice in support of striking Iran who described the president as 'very focused, very calm' after a Tuesday night phone call. 'I feel like when he says no nukes for Iran, he means it,' Graham said the next day. 'He gave them a chance for diplomacy. I think they made a miscalculation when it comes to President Trump.' One of the most prominent voices opposing a strike, his onetime top strategist Steve Bannon, was at the White House midday Thursday for a lunch with the president that had been rescheduled from several weeks ago. He revealed nothing of his conversation with Trump on his 'War Room' show later Thursday. But a day earlier, he told a roundtable that getting involved in a drawn-out conflict with Iran would amount to repeating a historic mistake. 'My mantra right now: The Israelis have to finish what they started,' he said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast. 'We can't do this again. We'll tear the country apart. We can't have another Iraq.' For Trump, the swirl of options, opinions and advice is nothing new. He has faced the Iran decision much as he has most every other major choice of his presidency, by soliciting advice and trying to arrive at a solution that will please the widest swath of his supporters. The answer this time may not be as simple, nor does Trump hold all the cards in a conflict that is playing out across the world. Israel's decision to launch strikes a week ago — while not a surprise to the president — still came against his public entreaties to hold off. And in Iran, he is confronting an adversary with a long history of hardening its positions under pressure from the United States. As he was arriving Friday at his home in New Jersey, Trump said it would be hard to ask Netanyahu to ease up on strikes on Iran in order to pursue diplomacy, given Israel's success in the conflict so far. And he said the two-week window he set a day earlier was the maximum period of time he would allow for diplomacy to work, reserving the option of ordering a strike before that time is up. The president couldn't say whether the decision now in front of him is the biggest he'd face as president. But as he tries to find the balance between ending Iran's nuclear ambitions and keeping the US from war, he did offer an evaluation of what he wanted his legacy to be on the other side. 'Always a peacemaker,' he said. 'That doesn't mean — sometimes, you need some toughness to make peace. But always a peacemaker.'
Yahoo
10 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump administration almost totally dismantles Voice of America with latest terminations
The Trump administration has terminated 639 employees at Voice of America and its parent organization in the latest round of sweeping cuts that have reduced the international broadcasting service to a fraction of its former size. The mass terminations announced Friday rounds out the Trump-led elimination of 1,400 positions since March and represents the near-complete dismantling of an organization founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda, whose first broadcast declared: 'We bring you voices from America.' Just 250 employees now remain across the entire parent group the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), who operated what was America's primary tool for projecting democratic values globally. 'For decades, American taxpayers have been forced to bankroll an agency that's been riddled with dysfunction, bias and waste. That ends now,' said Kari Lake, Trump's senior advisor to USAGM, in Friday's termination announcement. VOA once reached 360 million people weekly across dozens of languages, former USAGM CEO and director John Lansing told Congress in 2019. In March, the White House put out a statement calling the outlet 'propaganda', 'leftist' and dubbed it 'The Voice of Radical America'. One of the examples cited to justify that explanation was VOA's refusal to use the term 'terrorist' to describe members of Hamas unless in statements, which falls in line with common and basic journalistic practice. The cuts represent a major retreat from America's Cold War strategy of using broadcasting to reach audiences behind the iron curtain. VOA had evolved from its wartime origins to become a lifeline for populations living under authoritarian rule, providing independent news and an American perspective in regions where press freedom is under assault. The layoffs also came just days after VOA recalled Farsi-speaking journalists from administrative leave to cover the war between Israel and Iran, after Israel shot missiles at Tehran less than a week ago in the dead of night. 'It spells the death of 83 years of independent journalism that upholds US ideals of democracy and freedom around the world,' said three VOA journalists, Patsy Widakuswara, Jessica Jerreat and Kate Neeper, who are leading legal challenges against the demolition, in a statement. The agency's folding began in March when Trump signed an executive order targeting federal agencies he branded as bloated bureaucracy, and VOA staff were placed on paid leave and broadcasts were suspended. Lake, Trump's handpicked choice to run VOA, had previously floated plans to replace the service's professional journalism with content from One America News Network (OANN), a rightwing pro-Trump network that would provide programming without charge. The sole survivor of the cull is the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which transmits into Cuba from Florida. All 33 employees there remain, according to the announcement. USAGM offered voluntary departure packages through what it termed a 'Fork in the Road' program, providing full pay through September plus benefits. Some 163 employees accepted the buyouts rather than face involuntary termination, the agency said in a press release. Federal courts have allowed the administration to proceed with the terminations while legal challenges continue for now. The VOA cuts form part of Trump's broader assault on the federal workforce, with tens of thousands terminated across agencies including the IRS, Social Security Administration, USAID, and departments of education, health and agriculture.
Yahoo
10 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump: ‘Hard' for Israel to stop strikes now
President Trump said Friday it would be difficult for Israel to stop strikes on Iran at this point, a week into the intense conflict between the two nations and two weeks out from the president's decision on U.S. involvement. 'I think it's very hard to make that request right now,' he said when pressed about the Iranian foreign minister saying that the U.S. would call on Israel to stop airstrikes if Trump is serious about negotiations. 'If somebody is winning, it's a little bit harder to do than if somebody is losing, but we're ready, willing and able, and we've been speaking to Iran, and we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens,' Trump added. The president also said he might support a ceasefire but continued, 'it's very hard to stop when you look at it — Israel's doing well in terms of war, and I think you would say that Iran is doing less well.' As of Thursday, correspondence between the U.S. and Iran 'has continued,' according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who did not provide specifics about whether communications were direct or through intermediaries. Leavitt also said Thursday that Trump will make a decision 'in the next two weeks' on whether to intervene in Israel's conflict with Iran. Trump on Friday described the two-week timeline as the maximum he would give to Iran. 'We're going to see what that period of time is, but I'm giving them a period of time, and I would say two weeks would be the maximum,' he said. Additionally, he was asked if an aerial campaign in Iran would be enough or if ground forces would be necessary if the U.S. were to get involved. Trump pushed back on the idea of boots on the ground. 'Well, I'm not going to talk about ground forces. The last thing you want to do is ground force,' he said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
