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Welcome back to False Flag! Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites has put Trump’s biggest fans in a bind. And, dear reader, you’d never guess: most of them are taking the cult-like way out of it.
— Will Sommer
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Catturd of Arabia
FOR YEARS, PRO-TRUMP INFLUENCERS have claimed that only Donald Trump will keep America out of endless wars in the Middle East. They’ve insisted that Trump’s electoral foes, from Nikki Haley to Kamala Harris, would inevitably embroil the United States in a new Afghanistan- or Iraq-style quagmire.
So when Trump announced, via a Saturday evening bleet, that he had bombed Iranian nuclear sites, it put his most vocal fans in a quandary: Should they sacrifice any sense of ideological consistency to keep supporting Trump, or should they try to maintain some sense of self-respect and dignity by criticizing the man around whom they’ve built their careers?
For most, the choice hasn’t been particularly hard. With only a few exceptions, right-wing figures who had positioned themselves against the neocon war machine suddenly discovered a new enthusiasm for American military might. And that enthusiasm only deepened as Iran’s retaliatory strikes seemed designed to deescalate the situation and after Trump announced on Monday afternoon that there would be a ceasefire between Iran and Israel (as usual with Trump, grains of salt apply).
Well before those developments, the spin from the MAGA dove crowd was centrifuge like. Take Juanita Broaddrick, the Bill Clinton accuser who has developed a career as a Trump pundit, with 1.8 million followers on X.
“THIS IS NOT OUR WAR!” Broaddrick posted on June 12.
That was eleven whole days ago. After the bombing raid, however, Broaddrick turned into an expert on the art of war.
“No other country in the world could have carried out what occurred tonight,” she wrote. “Only the US military has this kind of weaponry.”
Broaddrick isn’t the only one catching war fever. On June 16, right-wing influencer Gunther Eagleman praised the news that Trump was considering holding back from bombing Iran. He echoed Broaddrick and others, writing that it was “not our war.”
After the bombs dropped, though, Eagleman picked up the trumpet and fifes.
“I stand with Trump, I trust Trump!” Eagleman wrote on June 22. “He made the right call.”
The flips flops from MAGA pundits have been so plentiful that the “Thiss_You” X account has taken over the task of chronicling them. And while seismic Trumpworld changes are nothing new—as in the decision among right-wing figures that the once-heroic Elon Musk was now a villain after he attacked Trump—there’s something depressing about this episode. That might be because it offers the clearest illustration to date of MAGA figures’ unabashed willingness to abandon whatever previous positions they held in order to maintain their faith in Trump.
Consider YouTuber Benny Johnson, who has built a career as one of the president’s most over-the-top enthusiastic fans. Once a fierce critic of foreign intervention in the Middle East, Johnson decided after the bombs fell to throw his hands up and trust the plan. Call it faith not seeking understanding.
“Donald Trump has earned my respect and trust,” Johnson wrote on X on June 21. “I don’t have the intel, Trump does. I trust his team.”
Many of the explanations these MAGA doves offered for their switch turned on a distinction between a one-off air strike against targets in Iran and a larger strategic policy aimed at wholesale “regime change.” Along these lines, these previously anti-war figures argued that so long as Trump doesn’t try to overthrow the Iranian government, a couple of bombing runs doesn’t really qualify as a war. What’s a few bunker-busters between frenemies?
In his June 21 post, for example, Johnson argued that Trump would qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize as long as there’s no “regime change.”
“No destabilization, no regime change, no migrant crisis,” Johnson wrote. “Perhaps even a peace deal? Well, then give Trump the Nobel Peace Prize.”
But even that distinction began to collapse on Sunday, when Trump boasted on Truth Social that he didn’t see why regime change should be off the table. And so, naturally, the MAGA doves had to change their arguments again: Regime change is fine now, so long as Trump merely encourages it but doesn’t actively facilitate it. More broadly, a new war in the Middle East will be different from the last wars in the Middle East because Trump is too smart to do his war in the Middle East badly. Vice President J.D. Vance—himself a longtime skeptic of U.S. involvement in the region—summed up that defense in a Meet the Press appearance on Sunday, arguing that the difference between Trump’s involvement in Iran and previous American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that prior presidents were “dumb.”