“One of Trump’s biggest promises was ‘With me, you’ll get less war – I’m the anti-war president’
Yeah, right!!
There's nothing you can trust from him.
Except the war on Immigration, which is enough to appease the MAGA base.
Exactly like I said months ago, this is America's Brexit- large sacrifices and compromises just to address the single Immigration issue. And in UK, the issue wasn't even solved and gone worse post-Brexit. Trump’s anti-war vow tested as Israel attack on Iran splits MAGA base
Fear is growing among supporters that the latest conflict in the Middle East will embroil a reluctant president in another overseas military entanglement.
Guy Chazan
Updated Jun 15, 2025 – 1.58pm,first published at 1.44pm
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Donald Trump won last year’s US election promising to be a president of peace. With America now at risk of being dragged into a new war between Israel and Iran, that pledge is looking increasingly hollow.
Trump said on the campaign trail that he could easily resolve the conflict in Gaza, use diplomacy to halt Iran’s nuclear program, and end the war between Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office.
In his victory speech in November, he said: “They said, ‘He will start a war’. I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.”
It was a message that held huge appeal for American voters tired of decades of US military interventions in the Middle East and Afghanistan – the seemingly interminable engagements Trump frequently referred to as America’s “forever wars”.
Yet, the fear is growing among Trump’s loyal MAGA base that Israel’s strikes against Iran and the latter’s response will embroil an anti-war president in another foreign entanglement – this time between the two biggest military powers in the Middle East.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist in his first term, says US and Israeli interests were not necessarily identical in the current crisis. “They [the Israelis] are ‘Israel first’, we need to always be ‘America first’,” he says. “And in Jerusalem, they should reflect on the message of Christ: live by the sword, die by the sword.”
Asked by the Financial Times whether he feared the US would be dragged into a war with Iran, he replies: “Very much.”
Trump himself has denied he is betraying his principles, telling the Atlantic magazine that a MAGA foreign policy means whatever he says it does.
“Well, 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 that,” Trump says. “For those people who say they want peace – you can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon.”
Nevertheless, there is a real fear among Trump’s supporters that beyond its missile attacks on Israel over the weekend, Tehran might also hit at US military assets in the region. “Israel is trying to get Iran to attack us just like your bitchy ex who tried goading some dude in a bar to fight you,” Tim Pool, the popular right-wing podcaster, writes on X.
“Is the United States about to be sucked into yet another war in the Middle East?” says Jack Posobiec, a far-right media personality. “Because that’s exactly the opposite of what … President Trump campaigned for back in Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin.”
Posobiec was speaking on Thoughtcrime, a video roundtable hosted by right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, just as details of the Israeli strikes were coming in. Both indicated the Israeli action would set alarm bells ringing among Trump’s base.
“This is going to schism MAGA terribly online,” Kirk says. “You’re going to see – I don’t want to say a MAGA civil war, but it’s going to be a MAGA online food fight, [which] is going to be very hard to navigate.”
Kirk later posted hawks would be urging the US to “finish off the mullahs”. But he warns: “America’s interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya were all easy at the start. It was in the months and years afterwards that they became costly, wasteful quagmires. None of them were worth it.”
On the same podcast, Tyler Bowyer, an activist at conservative non-profit Turning Point USA, says: “If you could probably sum up President Trump’s campaign from 2024, it was that ‘Electing me is going to prevent World War III.’”
“One of Trump’s biggest promises was ‘With me, you’ll get less war – I’m the anti-war president’,” Bowyer adds.
Matthew Boyle, Washington bureau chief of right-wing populist news website Breitbart, says Trump faces a precarious balancing act, keeping the US out of a wider war while continuing to back Israel, one of America’s closest allies, and ensuring Iran never gets a nuclear bomb.
“What he does from here could define his presidency,” he says. “But if there’s anyone who can handle such a perilous situation, it’s President Trump.”
Complicating matters for the president’s MAGA supporters was the fog of uncertainty over Trump’s real position on the Israeli attack. In late May, he said he had warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to attack Iran while Washington was negotiating with Tehran over a nuclear deal.
That initially led some observers to speculate that Netanyahu had gone against US wishes in launching its attack, an impression enhanced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said the US had not been involved and described the strikes as a “unilateral action” by Israel.
But on Friday, Trump came out in support of the Israeli strikes, telling the Wall Street Journal that Washington had known about them in advance. He called them the “greatest thing ever for the market” because they would stop Iran from developing “a nuclear weapon that was a great threat to humanity”.
“Trump has now praised Israel’s strike, affirmed US material support and Israeli media is reporting his public opposition was a disinformation campaign to mislead Iran,” says Saagar Enjeti, right-wing co-host of the podcast Breaking Points. “So, in other words, Trump, not Israel, has made a mockery of all of us [who] wanted to avoid this war.”
But Breitbart’s Boyle says he firmly believed Trump’s goal of a historic deal to end Iran’s nuclear program could still be in reach, despite the Israeli assault – and that the chances of it happening had now increased.
“If anything, what Israel did strengthens Trump’s hand in negotiations with the Iranians,” he says. “It might create leverage that didn’t exist before.”
This echoed Trump’s comments. In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash at the weekend, he said the Iranian “hardliners” the US had been dealing with in the nuclear negotiations were “all dead”.
Asked by Bash if Israel had killed them, he replied: “They didn’t die of the flu.”
