Trump Is Suddenly Raging at Tucker Carlson—and MAGA Is Deeply Rattled

What’s more, many Democrats oppose war with Iran. As Matt Duss argues, Trump helped pave the way to this moment by withdrawing from America’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran; our intelligence services have not assessed that Iran has decided to produce nuclear weapons; and rushing into war now would be illegal and further destabilize the Mideast.

Leading Democratic officials have endorsed a similar view, and Massie’s resolution has a number of Democratic co-sponsors. Meanwhile, Senator Tim Kaine has introduced a similar resolution in the upper chamber.

Khanna says he believes that all but about 20 Democrats will support the House measure, and he hopes to keep the defections much lower (a Senate Democratic aide expects a few defections on Kaine’s resolution, as well). As Khanna put it to me, this is a test for both parties, and at bottom a test of whether we’re “going to have an antiwar party in America” at all.

So some Republicans will be needed. But how many self-described MAGA Republicans will step up?

There are reasons for skepticism. Zack Beauchamp has persuasively argued that the whole idea of Trump’s “antiwar” appeal rests on deep confusion. While Trump didn’t start major wars, he does favor targeted but extremely aggressive military violence where he perceives it as being in narrow U.S. interests (or perhaps his own). In his first term, Trump relaxed rules on drone killings and other types of protections against civilian casualties, leading both to soar.

Meanwhile, some confuse Trump’s hostility to the postwar liberal international order with an “isolationism” that eschews foreign military entanglements. But as Nicholas Grossman points out, this doesn’t reflect principled opposition to military action. It reflects Trump’s desire to shred the Western alliance and suck up to authoritarians who similarly hate that alliance, while generally undermining multilateralism and any other international frameworks he might perceive as constraining to the U.S.—and to himself.