‘Open betrayal’ or ‘just and imperative’? Trump’s Iran strikes divide conservative media

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump repeatedly pledged to get the US out of “endless wars”, put “America first” and focus on domestic policy. After his first term, he was fond of boasting, somewhat misleadingly, that there were “no wars” during his presidency.

Now the Trump administration’s decision to join Israel in attacking Iran has shocked the US and the world. It has also divided conservative media in the US – with many journalists and pundits on the right celebrating Trump’s decision to confront a longtime American foe, but others expressing dismay or confusion at the revival of a Bush-style interventionism that they thought the Maga movement had repudiated.

“There is a Maga generational divide on this. Older voters support it, younger voters do not,” the rightwing, pro-Maga podcaster Jack Posobiec told Politico. “Gen Z Maga wants arrests on Epstein, deportations and economic relief, not more war.”

Yet that would appear to be a minority view across much of the biggest conservative media players. Rupert Murdoch’s news empire has taken a mostly cheerleading stance toward the ongoing military operation, with Fox News contributors describing the strike on Iran as “just and imperative” and “a successful, coordinated effort to promote fundamental and lasting change in Iran”. In an editorial, the New York Post praised Trump’s “decisive move to destroy Iran’s war machinery and take out the regime’s leadership”.

The editorial board of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, arguably the last remaining big avatar of the Bush-era right, described the strikes as “necessary” and argued that the “biggest mistake President Trump could make now would be to end the war too soon, before Iran’s military and its domestic terror forces have been more thoroughly destroyed”.

National Review, a magazine that was for decades the voice of the conservative establishment but has occupied a more uncertain position in the age of Trump-style populism, has also mostly seemed to endorse the strikes, with one contributor urging the US to supply the Iranian opposition with weapons, and another asserting that comparisons with the Iraq war are fallacious and that the Iran war will probably be over “within a few weeks”.

Conservative outlets’ positions on the Iran war generally hew to longstanding positions on Israel and hawkish foreign policy. The more ardently pro-Israel publications, such as the Washington Free Beacon, the Daily Wire and Tablet magazine have fiercely defended the necessity of the strikes, though Matt Walsh, a Daily Wire contributor, mocked the administration’s rationales for the war on social media, saying: “The messaging on this thing is, to put it mildly, confused”

He added in another post: “It’s foolhardy to think you can just drop in, take out the top guy and leave with no problem.”

The Free Press, the publication that Bari Weiss founded before becoming editor-in-chief of CBS News, has seemed to split the difference, with several pieces sympathetic to a desire to topple the Iranian regime, but cautious or pessimistic about the chances of success. In a piece called The Case Against the War, the writer and military veteran Elliot Ackerman noted that the “Arab spring offers several dire examples of popular protests for democracy mutating into deadly civil wars, chief among them the decade-long civil war in Syria. A civil war in Iran on the scale of Syria would be catastrophic.” Weiss herself reportedly angered some CBS staffers when she boosted a critique of Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, for coming out against the strikes.

Parts of the isolationist-leaning hard right of the Maga movement, however, appear furious with the Trump administration for what Curt Mills, the executive director of the American Conservative, said on Steve Bannon’s podcast was an “open betrayal” of the Maga base.

Tucker Carlson told ABC News that the Iran attack is “absolutely disgusting and evil”, and argued that Trump’s decision would further unsettle an already fragile conservative political coalition. Carson said: “This is going to shuffle the deck in a profound way.”

Trump’s decision to join Israel in attacking Iran is highly likely to empower a Christian nationalist stream of the right, which has often spun legitimate criticisms of the US alliance with Israel into outright antisemitism.

On the far right, the conspiracy theorist Candace Owens and the white nationalist pundit Nick Fuentes both condemned the war, with Fuentes mocking the credulity of people who voted for Trump thinking he represented a sharp break with US foreign policy. On X, Owens dubbed the US-Israeli operation “Operation Epstein Fury” and invoked antisemitic conspiracy theories to declare that “Goyim always … die so the Khazarian mafia can expand their borders.”

Most of the “podcast bros” – the influential group of podcasters, such as Joe Rogan, Andrew Schulz and Theo Von – have so far not weighed in, though if past indications are reliable, they will probably be ambivalent or outright critical of Trump’s decision to attack Iran.

The American Conservative, a magazine co-founded by Pat Buchanan in 2002, is the standard bearer for a “paleoconservative” wing of the American right that has been skeptical of foreign wars, free trade and free market absolutism, and was unsurprisingly scathing about the Iran strikes. On X, the magazine pointedly posted a video of JD Vance, in 2024, saying: “Our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be [a] huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.”