White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt downplayed ongoing tensions within the MAGA movement over the Iran war during a gaggle with reporters on Friday.
“I would just remind people X is not real life,” Leavitt said after being asked about social media battles over Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.-Israel attack on Iran that launched nearly one week ago.
“This president lives in the real world,” Leavitt continued. “And with respect to MAGA, President Trump is the leader of MAGA. He’s the creator of the MAGA movement. And there is nothing more ‘America First’ than taking out terrorists who have maimed and killed our own service men and women, who chant ‘Death to America,’ and who pose a threat to the homeland.”
Several of MAGA’s most prominent media figures have publicly questioned how Trump’s war is in line with “America First” principles. Others have criticized the White House for not publicly explaining the reasoning behind it.
“Trump, Vance, Tulsi, and all of us campaigned on no more foreign wars and regime change,” former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a MAGA adherent-turned-Trump critic, wrote on X. “Now, America soldiers are dead.”
Some, in particular, were incensed when Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to say that the intelligence the U.S. initially floated of a looming Iranian attack on American interests would be in response to an Israeli action. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, has even taken to calling the conflict “Israel’s war.”
“First, why did this happen? Now, in this case, there’s a really simple answer,” Carlson said in a video post on X. “This happened because Israel wanted it to happen. This is Israel’s war. This is not the United States’s war.”
Leavitt sought to defend the administration’s attacks against Iran as the result of failed negotiations over its nuclear capabilities.
“President Trump is a leader of the peace through strength foreign policy doctrine,” she said. “He attempted peace through diplomacy exhaustively and extensively with the rogue Iranian regime. So they have been struck with the strength and the sheer might and will of the United States armed forces.
Trump, according to Leavitt, “has the courage to do what so many presidents in the past did not,” by moving at all costs to block Iran from having a nuclear bomb.
At least one recent survey shows that the MAGA faithful may be siding with Trump over his critics on X. An NBC News poll released this week found that 90% of self-identified MAGA Republicans support Trump’s actions against Iran.
