The most dangerous battle facing Trump isn’t in Iran

A core belief of the Maga movement is that America should stay out of foreign wars, writes Jon Sopel. As Trump considers his next move against Iran, he will need to be careful not to alienate his support at home

It had the feel of two ageing dons sparring in the senior common room, both smugly full of self-admiration with their own cleverness. This was the encounter between two of Maga’s leading intellectual apostles: Senator Ted Cruz from Texas (Princeton University and Harvard Law) and one-time Fox News host, unrivalled leader in white grievance politics and influential beyond justification, Tucker Carlson.

There was an “en garde” – and from there they parried and counterparried in an interview broadcast this week. There was the occasional lunge as the two fiftysomethings engaged in their dialectic on the wisdom or otherwise of Donald Trump allowing the US to become dragged into the Iran/Israel conflict.

It has been one of the articles of faith, one of the foundational beliefs of the Maga movement that America should not be the world’s policeman – although the isolationist, pull-up-the-drawbridge, let the rest of the world get on with it school of thought is nothing new.

There’s always been that strand to American thought, even if Donald Trump is shouting it more loudly. There is also a more practical, realpolitik side to it in Trump’s mind. Put simply, what good did it ever do a president? LBJ felled by Vietnam; Bush 43 and his neocon Iraq misadventure; Biden and the calamitous Afghan withdrawal. In Trump’s mind, nothing positive ever comes of it, so why go there in the first place?

For all the lofty words between messers Cruz and Carlson, the row boils down to this. According to Carlson, if America First means anything, it requires you staying out of other people’s wars. Meanwhile, Ted “yeah, but” Cruz’s view was Iran is a menace, we like Israel, they are our ally and we have to be on their side – and the clincher: the mullahs in Tehran had earlier made clear they wanted to assassinate Trump, so America does have a dog in the fight.

It is a faultline that is running through Maga. And where the president, who just celebrated his 79th birthday with a military parade in Washington, is seemingly treading tentatively. Leave aside the paradox of Trump wanting a military parade for an armed forces he never wants to use (except maybe for vanity parades through the centre of DC, or to deploy for civil protests in California), the acolytes are picking up their ideological swords and clashing with each other over whether to send a B-2 bomber from the US airbase at Diego Garcia armed with a MOP, a 30,000lb “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” strapped to the undercarriage to bomb Iran’s nuclear site buried deep in the mountains.

Trump has said he will decide in the next two weeks if the US will get directly involved in supporting Israel’s attacks.

The most interesting intervention has come from the vice-president, JD Vance, who is seen as an arch proponent of isolationism. Of course, he has to do the president’s bidding – but his was a carefully argued case on X (if anything can be carefully litigated on X). His argument was that if Iran was only interested in civil nuclear power, why did it need to enrich uranium to the levels it was doing? And therefore, if Iran got hold of a nuclear weapon, just think what a menace it would be to American interests in the Middle East.

Understandably, around the world, the question of whether the US will get involved in attacking Iran is garnering all the headlines – it could be the most consequential decision of Trump’s second term. But within the US, there is another foundational argument about the core principles of Maga roiling the populist right. And it’s over illegal immigration.

Go to more or less any restaurant in the US and you will find there are two classes of servers. There are the waiters and waitresses who will take your food order – in Washington, they are invariably college kids, and in New York, out-of-work actors. And then there is the lower strata of plate-clearers and water-glass fillers. And they are more often than not Hispanic.

It is the same in garden work or road construction. Likewise hotels. And in the fruit basket of California – the central belt – almost all the fruit is picked by Latinos. A huge percentage of these workers are “illegals”, totally in the crosshairs of Trump’s promise to purge the US of this shadow workforce.

The problem is – just like over whether to bomb Iran – ideological purity is banging its head against practical politics. Trump this week told his immigration chief to ease off the gas when it comes to deporting hotel workers and those in the fields and those clearing the plates. Why? Because a lot of these industries would collapse without the plentiful supply of cheap immigrant labour. And Trump’s wealthy friends with hotel chains and big agriculture interests have told him so. Cue Maga divisions over whether the president is going soft and betraying his promises.

All of which brings us to the president himself. The Iran decision is weighing heavily. He has given himself a two-week window to make his call. But to those who question his Maga bona fides, he more or less said this: I invented it, I decide what it means – and anyway, my base loves me more than it ever did.

All of which could lead one to the uncomfortable conclusion: that the real battle for Trump is at home, not Iran.