Was MAGA ever really "anti-war"?

Trump and his new svengali Marco Rubio on March 20, 2026

I have an article today in Unherd addressing this question.

But really doing it justice would’ve required far more than the 800 words I was graciously allotted.

Because here’s a depressing reality that needs to be much better theorized, in my view, following a realization I only came to terms with fully in the past several years: raw partisanship is as good a predictor of war support/opposition than anything else.

One can find attitudes toward military conflict correlating with partisan affiliation at least back to the 1990s, although the correlations were not quite as pronounced then as they are today, after a decade plus of Trump’s omnipresence as the central animating principle of everyone’s daily political awareness. See this poll from April 27, 1999, taken amid the US-led bombing operation in Yugoslavia, during a phase when deployment of US and NATO ground troops was being contemplated. There was a sizable partisan gap: a net +34% of Democrats agreed that launching the war two months earlier was the “right thing,” while a net -10% of Republicans agreed with the statement. Likewise, 31% of Democrats labeled the mission a “mistake,” while 55% of Republicans labeled it that.

But when the question was framed specifically in respect to the performance of Bill Clinton, the partisan reaction got hugely more amplified. “Only 26 percent of Republicans trust Clinton to make the right decisions about the Kosovo conflict,” reported ABC News, “compared to 80 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of independents.”

Did this make Republicans any less intrinsically militaristic than Democrats in 1999? Probably not. Because only a short four years later, 90% or more of Republicans would staunchly support the invasion of Iraq, commanded as it was by a political leader they had vested with much greater personal trust: George W. Bush. On the other hand, Democrats were far less likely to support the 2003 invasion, even though a healthy 50% did so. Compared to today’s numbers, the partisan gap has only gotten spectacularly wider. Democrats’ support for the current Iran War has plummeted to paltry single digits, while around 85% of Republicans are supporting it. To crystallize things a bit, a lesser percentage of Democrats appear to support the 2026 Iran War than the percentage of Americans who approve of Jeffrey Epstein!

But does this make the Democrats of today any less intrinsically militaristic than their partisan counterparts? Perhaps ever-so-slightly around the margins, but in the main, probably not. In March 2024, 83% of Biden 2020 voters supported provisioning endless armaments to Ukraine, compared to only 40% of Trump 2020 voters. You’d be hard-pressed to locate any essential reason for this divide, other than the random contingencies of fickle partisan sentiment. Because turn back the clock two years, to March 2022, and it was Republicans who were actually leading the way in declaring Russia a mortal “enemy,” with Democrats lagging a tick behind.

“It’s Still John McCain’s GOP,” blared the headline of an article I wrote in April 2022, and which I could easily repurpose almost verbatim today. The basis for my contention was that Congressional Republicans at the time were formulating their critique of Biden’s policy almost exclusively from the standpoint of their aggrievement that Biden wasn’t aggressive enough in arming Ukraine, and wasn’t resolute enough in confronting Russia. Trump himself echoed this view, briefly emerging from his temporary political hibernation to brag about how he was the one who first sent Javelin missiles to Ukraine (true) and musing that, contra Biden, he’d be rushing even more heavy weaponry to Kyiv than Joe had the stomach for. Trump also declared Putin’s invasion a “genocide,” and said he’d try to bully him into submission by deploying US nuclear submarines off the coast of Russia. This is something Trump would indeed go on to do in his haywire second term, at least according to an August 1, 2025 Truth Social post. Most recently, his former special envoy to Ukraine, General Keith Kellogg, is all over FOX proclaiming what a “big believer” he is in the necessity of a ground troop deployment to Iran. Having achieved nothing resembling any kind of war-cessation while he was handling the Ukraine portfolio, Kellogg has seamlessly transitioned to calling for “boots on the ground” to “occupy” Iran. “We kind of need to do it the way the Romans used to do it,” Kellogg proposed.

In the Unherd piece, I make brief mention of Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s role in this whole fiasco — but believe me, there’s plenty more to say. Yes, by now it’s modestly well-understood that flushed right down the memory-hole is that Tulsi Gabbard spent Trump’s entire first term excoriating him for what she described as his relentless pursuit of “regime change” around the world, and in particular Iran. See my January 2026 item, “The Spellbinding Transformation of Tulsi Gabbard.” However, it seems slightly less appreciated that RFK Jr. played an even more decisive role in the 2024 propaganda disaster. His vow that Trump 2.0 will “end the warfare state” will go down in infamy, if I have anything to do with it. Because such a painfully ludicrous statement should’ve been instantly recognized as such at the time, when RFK Jr. blurted it out at the now-notorious Madison Square Garden rally on October 27, 2024. How could anyone applaud that insane line, when Trump had never stopped boasting how he’d ushered in record-setting military budgets in his first administration, and had given every possible indication he’d continue to do so in a second? Sure enough, more than predictably, this has come to pass — and then some: Trump barreled into office demanding the first Trillion Dollar military budgets, now upgraded to $1.5 Trillion, with an extra $200 Billion now requested for Iran War expenditures, on top of the $156 Billion in supplemental military appropriations already secured last year in his signature “Big Beautiful Bill.” So what the ever-loving F was RFK Jr. even talking about? Pure blithering nonsense. It was incredibly disturbing to me at the time that so many people were eating it right up. See my October 2024 article:

Remnants of RFK’s nonsense 2024 propaganda still continue to percolate, unfortunately. Joe Kent, who resigned from the Trump Administration last week, to much buoyant cheering on the podcast circuit, continues to emphasize his enthusiastic support for Trump’s 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the top Iranian General. According to Kent, this drone-strike assassination proved Trump was uniquely positioned to achieve a diplomatic accord with Iran, because he was uniquely willing to “punch them in the face.” Nevermind that the Soleimani assassination was one crucial link in the causal chain that got us to where we are today, in terms of the Trump/GOP policy of unremitting anti-Iran bellicosity — the only logical culmination of which would have to be “regime change war against Iran,” as Tulsi Gabbard accurately predicted following the Soleimani hit. But that was before she decided to subordinate herself to the all-consuming Trump Borg.

Kent even espoused the view during the 2024 campaign that the “national security blob” was ardently opposed to Trump, because only Trump stood in the way of their longstanding Deep State Goal of having a war with Iran. Of course, rather than account for his own complicity in peddling such idiocies, Kent has chosen the Tucker Carlson / Megyn Kelly route of shunting off any and all “blame” onto a mythological caricature of Israel, whose tribune Bibi Netanyahu is perpetually beguiling and hypnotizing Trump at every turn, and tragically thwarted him from fulfilling his well-intentioned 2024 campaign promises. That whole little punditry cohort seems insistent on ignoring that among those heartfelt campaign promises was an explicit threat to blow Iran to “smithereens.”

Trump hasn’t even bothered to seek any legal authorization — whether internationally or domestically — for his Iran “excursion.” This may partly explain the modest dip in public support compared to the Iraq War. Because by the time of the March 2003 invasion, there had already been months and months of incendiary priming from Congress, the media, and elsewhere, to ready the masses for a war that supposedly needed to be waged. One might find the contrast with today “refreshing” on some level — Trump has totally discarded any pretense of public debate or deliberation, and just dove right in, in the middle of the night on February 28, so everybody would wake up the next morning and get whacked in the face with the news. Perhaps there are “pros and cons” to both approaches, but also, perhaps the ideal approach would be to refrain from launching any crazy wars to begin with. Your mileage may vary.

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