“Trump makes peace” was my headline a month and a half ago, but the war with Iran rumbles on in its twilight condition, resisting efforts to end it completely while also failing to erupt back into full-scale hostilities. And the longer it continues the more it exposes a deep fault line within Donald Trump’s coalition.
We’ve discussed this here before; I’ve drawn attention to the divide between what I’ll call the imperialists and the isolationists. The former are relatively traditional Republicans (represented by secretary of state Marco Rubio and the late senator Lindsey Graham), strongly pro-Israel, anti-Russian and predisposed to military solutions to all problems. The isolationists are the opposite: hostile to American commitments overseas, sympathetic to Vladimir Putin and sceptical of Israel, often to the point of open antisemitism.
Trump stands in the middle, unwilling to fully commit to either side. The attack on Iran was a tilt towards the imperialists, but his failure to escalate and his attempts to force Israel to make peace show his residual sympathy with the isolationists. Last week’s announcement of a “breakthrough” agreement with Hamas in Gaza will not endear him any more to the imperialist camp.
Note, however, an important asymmetry between the two sides. The imperialists were already at home in the Republican Party before Trump; although its power structures have been adapted to serve the president, imperialism remains its default position. But most of the isolationists are outsiders – it’s only by the grace of Trump that they’ve found a place within the party, and if they lose him they have nothing else to fall back on.
And some of them evidently do feel that they have lost him. First with the Epstein scandal last year, and now more seriously with the Iran war, a number of isolationists have denounced Trump and parted company with his administration. At the weekend a collection of them, including former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, former counter-terrorism official Joe Kent and Putinist commentator Tucker Carlson, announced the formation of a new “America First” movement to promote their position.
This is not a new party – at least not yet – but several of the isolationists have expressed their support for such a thing. As Elon Musk could tell them, getting a new party going in the United States isn’t easy: after announcing his plan for one a year ago, also motivated by irritation at Trump, he gave up on the idea after a month or two. It’s likely that an isolationist version would go the same way.
That said, the Trumpist discontent is a sign of the trouble looming for the Republican Party as it starts to face the reality that Trump will not be around forever. Turning the party into a cult of personality has worked as a uniting strategy, with devotion to Trump helping to suppress major differences of philosophy, policy and style. But a lame duck naturally inspires less devotion, and none of his potential successors have anything like Trump’s stature.
Neither wing of the party is likely to give in easily, and a contest for the presidential nomination between, say, Rubio and Carlson could split it down the middle. The isolationists may not be forming a separate party just yet, but that doesn’t mean they’ll stay within the fold forever.
The World is Not Enough 