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Proud Boys Say Trump Will Lose Their Support If He Goes To War With Iran
Turns out, there's a line the Proud Boys say they won't cross for President Donald Trump.
The extremist group said on social media this week that it wouldn't be able to support the president if the U.S. were to become involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran.
'If the United States gets directly involved in the Israel-Iran conflict, the voters that voted for Trump because there was a hope that Trump was America First can no longer support Trump,' the Proud Boys account posted to Telegram on Wednesday. 'America First does not mean war for Israel. Donald Trump, focus on the health of our nation, period. We are crumbling. We are crippled with debt with no plan for a solution. Be the President you ran as.'
Trump has approved attack plans for Iran but is withholding a final order to join Israel in the strikes, The Wall Street Journal reported first this week.
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The president said Thursday that he would have a decision within two weeks on whether the American military will directly attack Iran after Israel issued strikes on Iranian nuclear and military sites. Trump claimed his decision would be based on whether negotiations with Iran over the 'near future' of its nuclear program would occur.
Historically, the Proud Boys have been among some of Trump's most fervent supporters. Many members endlessly promoted or repeated Trump's lies about the 2020 election being rigged, and some members carried banners bearing his name during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Trump was asked on the presidential debate stage in 2020 if he would condemn white supremacists and, in particular, Proud Boys after a summer of clashes and violence involving the group. Trump instead told Proud Boys to 'stand back and stand by.'
Trump's hawkish stance toward Iran has opened a schism among some conservatives.
Even some of Trump's most vocal advocates, including former Fox News mouthpiece Tucker Carlson, have suggested that Trump and the United States at large were complicit in Israel's attacks on Iran.
'Years of funding and sending weapons to Israel, which Donald Trump just bragged about on Truth Social, undeniably place the U.S. at the center of last night's events,' Carlson wrote in a newsletter last week.
Trump has said he isn't 'looking to fight.'
'But if it's a choice between fighting and them having a nuclear weapon, you have to do what you have to do,' he said from the Oval Office on Wednesday, the same day the Proud Boys put out their warning on Telegram.
The Proud Boys' opposition to American involvement in foreign war isn't a concept outside of their wheelhouse: Members consider themselves ultra-nationalist, so-called 'western chauvinists' who believe it is their responsibility to preserve 'western' values.
As noted by the Anti-Defamation League, the group has long embraced ideologies that reject women, immigrants and members of the LGBTQ+ community, often aligning itself with white nationalist values. This emphasis on the preservation of 'traditional' American values and a rejection of the 'Deep State' often returns to criticism of the military industrial complex.
Many Proud Boys are also veterans; nearly all of the Proud Boys who were charged and convicted of seditiously conspiring to stop the certification of the 2020 election when attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, served in the military except for the group's leader, Henry 'Enrique' Tarrio.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
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