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Donald Trump leaned on new media and the conservative-ish podcasting sphere during his 2024 run for the presidency, to great success.
This week he may finally leave it behind.
As the president continues to flirt openly with the prospect of directly involving the U.S. in war with Iran, an ideological and largely generational divide is emerging within his voting coalition.
With traditional conservatives and full-throated supporters of the Israeli government on one side of the gap, many of Trump’s other allies — especially younger ones — are siding with the likes of Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and others publicly pushing the president to back down from his saber-rattling.
Though Trump has yet to issue the final order, his statements over the past week make it clear which way the president is leaning. On Monday, the president took a telling swipe at Carlson.
“I don’t know what Tucker Carlson is saying. Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen,” said the president.
Carlson is no mere Twitter troll. The right-wing podcaster maintains a massive audience on the social media platform where he now hosts his show directly, attracting millions of viewers per episode. But as Carlson and other podcasters increasingly warn that Trump is endangering his own agenda by plotting war, the president seems to be returning to the comparatively friendlier bubble of cable news, especially Fox, to soothe his feelings.
The right-leaning network quickly transformed into a cheer squad crowing for war this week, with commentators like Mark Levin, Clay Travis and Kayleigh McEnany all beating the drum in favor of U.S. involvement in Israel’s war. Greg Gutfeld, on Monday, battled against the label of “neoconservative” now being applied to the president by despondent anti-interventionists.
“I think to say he’s a ‘neocon’ is unfair. He wouldn’t do this unless he thought it had to be done,” Gutfeld claimed on The Five. “You kind of have to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
Though much of Fox is likely to swing towards whatever decision Trump ends up making, Levin in particular has been vitriolic in his calls for U.S. strikes on Iran and has warred with Carlson on Twitter.
Carlson, meanwhile, proved the power of his own brand on Tuesday when he released an excerpt of an interview with Sen. Ted Cruz, one of the loudest congressional voices in the pro-war camp. With rapid-fire questions about Iran’s population and ethnic makeup, Carlson made the Foreign Relations committee member look uninformed as the host laughed in the senator’s face.
Commenters said that Carlson “humiliated” the senator, who spent much of Wednesday afternoon tweeting angrily about the interview.
Though Trump denied as much to reporters Wednesday, there are clear signs of cracks in his base and greater indications that the larger “manosphere” podcasting community is skeptical of foreign military involvement. In one eyebrow-raising tweet Joe Rogan, who has yet to address the topic on his show, shared a song called “F*ck a war” Monday evening.
Theo Von is another podcaster whose interview with Trump in August of 2024 caused its own considerable amount of hand-wringing on the Harris campaign and broader left. Von regularly takes a skeptical tone towards the political influence of Israel’s government in the U.S. and the brutality of its assault on Gaza on his show, including during an interview with Vice President J.D. Vance this month.
This week, he was part of the chorus of online content creators calling out war with Iran who normally make up a significant segment of the Trump-friendly media sphere.
“I don’t trust the Israeli leader [Benjamin Netanyahu] at all. I don’t believe anything that guy says,” said a tense-sounding Von. “I don’t think that our soldiers should have to go and defend stuff that they start.”
Congressional Republicans are not rallying (yet) behind a measure introduced by Thomas Massie and several Democrats this week aimed at restricting the president’s ability to unilaterally declare war with Iran. But even on the Hill, where many fear a soured relationship with MAGA’s overlord, Republicans continue to come out against their party’s neoconservatives.
“I call them war pimps,” Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett told CNN on Wednesday. “You know, Lindsey Graham’s a friend of mine. Ted Cruz is a friend of mine. I just— look, I got a daughter who just turned 18 last week, on the same day as the president did and the United States Army. I don’t want to see her go to war.”
The skeptics of military intervention on the right know that they are playing a dangerous game. Insulting the president or otherwise angering him could provoke a major and unwanted response, while pushing Trump to one side. At the same time, many are clear that they believe war poses a near-certain risk of throwing the president’s agenda — explicitly including his mass deportation strategy — down the drain.
Democrats are largely aligned on the issue, even if leadership has once again stayed largely silent on both the Massie resolution and the prospect of assisting Israel with strikes on Iran. John Fetterman found himself once again on an island and explaining himself to critics after telling an interviewer that the president and Israel should finally “destroy the Iranians”.
If Trump does decide to take that path and commit to military involvement, the worried predictions of his “America First” allies on the far right could very well end up coming true. And the president could spend his final presidential term falling back into the warm, convenient embrace of the same Republicans he ridiculed in 2016, now standing beside him as his last remaining defenders.
