It’s hard to overstate how remarkable the spectacle is: Right-wing broadcasters Mark Levin and Megyn Kelly are trading sexual insults on social media, while Tucker Carlson is suggesting the president might be the Antichrist and Candace Owens is urging Congress to remove him under the 25th Amendment. The house that Donald Trump built is crumbling.
For nearly a decade, the MAGA movement has projected an image of absolute cohesion — an ecosystem where politicians, media figures and voters moved in lockstep. Now the Iran war has done something two impeachments, four indictments and an insurrection could not: It has forced that ecosystem to turn inward and exposed the contradictions that were always there. For years, Trump’s critics have assumed that exposure of his misconduct would eventually erode his support and change his supporters’ minds. But the durability of the MAGA base has shown the short-sightedness of that assumption. Identity, not information, has been the dominant force of Trumpism. But the Iran war is cutting through that dynamic because criticism of it is not easily reframed as a partisan attack.
