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 programme 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 on Thursday night will embroil an anti-war president in another foreign military entanglement — this time between the two biggest military powers in the Middle East.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist in his first term, said 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 said. “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 replied: “Very much.”
It is a fear that is widely shared among Trump’s supporters, as concerns grow that beyond the missile attacks on Israel on Friday afternoon, 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 rightwing podcaster, wrote on X.
“Is the United States about to be sucked into yet another war in the Middle East?” said Jack Posobiec, an 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 rightwing 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 said. “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 warned: “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 said: “If you could probably sum up President Trump’s campaign from 2024, it was that electing me is going to prevent world war three.”
“One of Trump’s biggest promises was ‘with me you’ll get less war — I’m the anti-war president’,” Bowyer added.
Matthew Boyle, Washington bureau chief of rightwing populist news website Breitbart, said 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 said. “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 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,” said Saagar Enjeti, rightwing 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 said he firmly believed Trump’s goal of a historic deal to end Iran’s nuclear programme 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 said. “It might create leverage that didn’t exist before.”
This echoed Trump’s comments. In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Friday 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.”