The Iran War Is Tearing Trump’s Coalition Apart
MAGA is not necessarily the same thing as America First.
Read original articleBe the first to vote
This article Leans:
This article is:
17 Comments
the thing nobody wants to say out loud is that this was always going to split once the bill came due. you can't run on "i'll fix inflation" and then blow up the middle east without people eventually doing the math at the pump.
The polling actually shows most of his base still blames Biden for gas prices even now, so the bill-coming-due part might take longer than the math would suggest.
yeah but that's not really how economic memory works, people adjust pretty quick once things stay bad under a new admin. six months in, blaming your predecessor gets thin.
the part where his supporters pretend the strait closing has nothing to do with his iran policy is gonna be fun to watch when their grocery bills double
Iran closing the strait is literally what happens when you actually stand up to them instead of sending pallets of cash like the last admin did.
How exactly does closing the Strait of Hormuz connect to his Iran policy specifically, though? That's Iran's move, not Trump ordering it.
The piece conflates two different failure modes. You can have genuine disagreement within a coalition about whether a military action is justified, versus having people stay silent because they're ideologically captured. Those are not the same tear in the fabric. Right now it's not clear which one we're looking at, and the reporting would need to show what actual dissent exists versus what's just performative positioning ahead of 2026.
Trump doesn't have a coalition, he has a cult. His base will rationalize literally anything he does, including a war that's spiking gas prices and making inflation worse for regular people. The only thing getting torn apart is our economy and any shred of credibility we had on the world stage. MAGA was always just a marketing slogan for authoritarian politics anyway.
So which is it, a cult that rationalizes everything or people mad enough about gas prices to actually split from him?
Nope, it's both at once: the hardcore True Believers will rationalize literally anything, while working people who voted him in on inflation promises are watching gas hit $6 a gallon and finally asking what they actually got. The coalition was always held together by "he'll fix the economy" and "he'll own the libs" but you can't sustain that when your
You're describing two real groups, but the second one shouldn't need a war to notice gas prices, and that's where the media angle matters most.
this is what happens when your entire political identity is just "own the libs" instead of actually believing anything. turns out you need some kind of actual principle to hold together when things get hard.
The problem is less that they lack principles and more that Trump's foreign policy has no consistent logic beyond immediate optics, so when the Strait of Hormuz actually closes and gas prices spike, the coalition fractures because some people care about jobs and others care about defense spending and nobody signed up for both getting worse simultaneously.
they got what they voted for, just didn't think it would actually hurt their wallet
The Strait of Hormuz closure alone is going to hurt working people more than any of his base realizes, and they're not going to blame him for it either.
nope, gas prices were already sky-high from Biden's disastrous energy policies, so Trump's actually cleaning up that mess not making it worse.
The Strait closure happened under Trump and gas is even higher now, so that "cleaning up" framing doesn't hold up no matter who you blame for the baseline.