To hear Tucker Carlson tell it, an American attack on Iran wasn’t just likely to precipitate World War III. It would do something worse: destroy Donald Trump’s presidency. “A strike on the Iranian nuclear sites will almost certainly result in thousands of American deaths at bases throughout the Middle East, and cost the United States tens of billions of dollars,” the conservative commentator wrote on X on March 17. “Trump ran for president as a peace candidate,” Carlson added on June 4. “It’s why he won. A war with Iran would amount to a profound betrayal of his supporters. It would end his presidency.”
“We can’t do this again, we’ll tear the country apart,” declared Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and 2016-campaign CEO, when asked on June 18 about potential war with Iran. “Worth noting how rare this crossover actually is,” observed Curt Mills, the anti-war executive director of The American Conservative, after Carlson joined Bannon’s podcast to oppose American intervention, dubbing the pair the “two largest intellectual architects of the Trump years other than the president.” The implication: Trump was risking his base if he didn’t stay out of the Israel-Iran conflict. “I’m very concerned based on every[thing] I’ve seen in the grassroots the last few months that this will cause a massive schism in MAGA,” wrote Charlie Kirk, the head of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA. “This is a White House that is responding in real time to its coalition,” which is “revolting to show it’s disgusted with the potential of war with Iran,” Mills told ABC News on June 21. That night, Trump bombed Iran.
The U.S. strike may or may not have obliterated the country’s nuclear facilities, but it has certainly obliterated the notion that any of the self-proclaimed MAGA intellectuals, such as Carlson and Bannon, speak for the Trump movement. Far from shattering the president’s coalition, Trump’s strike on Iran brought it together, despite the loud protestations of some of its supposed elites. “This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party,” CNN’s chief data analyst, Harry Enten, said three days after the attack on Iran, referring to polls showing that 76 percent of GOP voters approved of Trump’s action, compared with just 18 percent who didn’t. “Republicans are with Donald Trump on this, Tucker Carlson be darned. The bottom line is he does not speak for the majority of the Republican base.”
[Robert Kagan: American democracy might not survive war with Iran]
The conservative pollster Patrick Ruffini, whose 2023 book, Party of the People, predicted the shape of Trump’s victorious 2024 coalition, offered a similar conclusion. “Polling has been consistent that Republicans remain more committed to a posture of military strength—and MAGA Republicans more so, not less so, than other Republicans,” he told The Dispatch. Indeed, surveys before and after the attack found that self-described “MAGA Republicans” were more likely than other Republicans to back the president on Iran. In other words, Trump’s decision to strike the country’s nuclear sites didn’t just expose the Iranian regime’s empty threats of massive retaliation. It also exposed prominent commentators who have postured as tribunes of Trumpism to be pretenders to power, purporting to speak for a movement that has little interest in their ideas.
Watching the president dispense with his critics, the conservative influencer John Ekdahl quipped, “Props to President Trump for being able to manage a two front war against Iran and Tucker Carlson.” But neither of these was ever much of a contest. Few jobs in Trump world are more farcical than the position of “architect” of “America First”: There are no MAGA intellectuals, just Trump and opportunistic ideologues attempting to hitch their pet projects to his brand. The self-styled thought leaders of the Trump movement are merely political entrepreneurs trying to appropriate the president for their own purposes and to recast his chaotic and idiosyncratic decisions as reflections of their personal worldview.
“Considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides” what it means, Trump told my colleague Michael Scherer a week before the bombs dropped. The president was wrong about being the first to claim the mantle of “America First,” but right about everything else. “Trumpism” is not “anti-war” or “pro-worker,” “neoconservative” or “neo-isolationist,” or any other ideologically coherent category; it is whatever Trump says it is.
This has always been the case, notwithstanding the pretenses of Trump’s alleged intellectual allies. Back in 2017, Trump took office for the first time and brought along Bannon, who set up shop in the West Wing with a whiteboard full of goals for the new administration. Less than seven months later, however, Bannon was cast out of the White House. Not long after, Trump began publicly deriding him as “Sloppy Steve.”
Carlson has followed the same trajectory. The conservative podcast host spoke before Trump on the final night of the 2024 Republican National Convention and was seen as one of the big winners when the president returned to power. But again, Trump quickly tired of his ally’s antics. “I don’t know what Tucker Carlson is saying,” the president said in response to the commentator’s criticism of his Iran policy. “Let him go get a television network and say it so people actually listen,” he added—a reference to Carlson being fired from Fox News. Trump then mocked his longtime associate as “kooky Tucker Carlson” on Truth Social, and later claimed that Carlson called to apologize, something the latter has not denied, because whether it happened or not, he knows exactly where he stands.
The simple truth is this: There is Bannonism and Tuckerism, and perhaps, in a quiet corner of the Naval Observatory that has been repeatedly swept for bugs to ensure that the boss isn’t listening, J. D. Vance–ism. But there is no Trumpism without Trump. People in the president’s orbit are not his confidants—they are his chumps, to be used or discarded when doing so suits the principal’s purposes.
Carlson seemingly knows this—and resents it. “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” he texted his producer after the president lost reelection in 2020. “I truly can’t wait.” After the January 6 riot, Carlson texted: “He’s a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us. I’ve been thinking about this every day for four years.” Off the record, people like Carlson not only know that they do not represent Trump, but hold him in contempt. Why, then, do so many still take them seriously as reflections of the president’s perspective and coalition? And why does the myth of the Trump whisperer persist despite its manifest failure to explain events?
For enterprising conservatives, the utility is clear. Trump may not subscribe to any of their ideas, but he can be prodded to act on them, and in any case, he is 79 years old and serving his second term. Once he departs the scene, his base will be up for grabs among those who have managed to position themselves as its champions.
For some anti-Trump liberals, people like Bannon, Carlson, and Vance provide a perverse sort of reassurance. Trump’s opponents may find the ideologies of these men to be odious, but at least they suggest a method to the president’s madness. The presence of even a rough philosophical framework provides the false hope that what Trump will do next will be predictable and follow from first principles, rather than from haphazard impulse. Better, some may feel, to live in the realm of an evil but explicable king than in that of a demented one.
[Read: The MAGA coalition has turned on itself]
Finally, Bannon and later Carlson may have played into the media’s desire for an intellectual from their own class who could domesticate and interpret Trumpism in conventional terms. Rather than a boorish outsider winning the presidency on his own scattershot instincts, one could suppose there was a Svengali behind the scenes who had masterminded the whole affair. This belief imposed order on what appeared to be chaos, imputed logic to what otherwise looked like a personality cult, and thus rescued the prognosticating profession from a situation where its skills might no longer be of use.
The only problem with this arrangement was that the pro-Trump intellectuals and influencers were making it all up. They were the political equivalent of the Wizard of Oz, shadows behind a curtain trying to fool people into thinking that they spoke for the president and his movement. But like Oz’s projection, they were nothing more than an intimidating illusion. All it took to make them disappear was for Trump to turn on the lights.