Are MAGA restrainers pulling their punches this time on Iran?

The Trump administration appears to be moving closer to a U.S. war with Iran, and there are plenty on the right, including inside MAGA, rallying against it. Unfortunately, they seem much more drowned out this time around.

Marjorie Taylor Greene certainly does her bit. “Americans do not want to go to war with Iran!!!” the former Republican congresswoman shared on X Wednesday. “And they voted for NO MORE FOREIGN WARS AND NO MORE REGIME CHANGE.”

Senator Rand Paul declares, “We have every right to defend our troops and shoot down threats. But you cannot bomb a regime into freedom.” Congressman Thomas Massie says no war with Iran, and is demanding a congressional vote.

Curt Mills, Executive Director of the American Conservative, has also pushed back on Washington hawks, recently telling Trump ally and former adviser Steve Bannon that the neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies is “driving the push for war" with Iran and that "they have been instrumental in writing a lot of Trump's Iran policy. They are blowing the horn for war."

MAGA-adjacent figures like libertarian comedian and frequent Joe Rogan guest Dave Smith are clanging the warning bells too. “If they start talking to you about fighting a war with Iran, treat them like the enemy that they are,” Smith has said about war promoters on the right.

The Cato Institute’s Justin Logan, Jon Hoffman, and Brandan P. Buck are speaking out about the military build up, as have Judge Andrew Napolitano, Doug Macgregor, and Danny Davis, and last but certainly not least, former congressman, presidential candidate and libertarian icon, Ron Paul.

But the relative silence from other quarters is disconcerting.

Bannon said the U.S. bombing Tehran would be “insane” — but that was nearly a month ago. Sure, Tucker Carlson, a longtime opponent of war with Iran, said that if Trump launched a war with Iran it would be, “a middle finger in the faces of the millions of voters who cast their ballots in hopes of creating a government that would finally put the United States first.” But that was eight months ago, before Trump bombed Iran the first time in “Operation Midnight Hammer.”

Tucker is not as vocal about the immense firepower amassing in the region today, which dwarfs Washington’s regional military posture in June. Though to his credit, Carlson pressed U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee on the issue of Iran during his nearly 90-minute long interview with him, released Friday.

“I’ve never met an American that thinks, other than the people with ideological reasons to pretend they think it, that the imminent threat to America is having anything to do with Iran," he told Huckabee during a lengthy exchange about whether the U.S. should still be giving $3.8 billion in aid to Israel. He criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for pressuring President Trump to attack Iran.

"I don’t care about Iran. At all," Carlson said. "I care about America. And if blowing up Iran makes my country richer then let’s say that I’m for it. And if it doesn’t I’m totally opposed. It’s that simple. I think most Americans feel that way, no?"

One could point out that it has not been easy crossing the president on war or any other issue. Greene and Massie are so loathed by Trump at this point that he vowed to primary Greene, who retired instead. Meanwhile, Trump is currently backing a primary opponent against Massie. He regularly uses Massie and Paul as punch lines in his speeches, calling them names like “moron” and “loser.”

So who is the president listening to?

Lifelong Republican hawk, Sen. Lindsey Graham has spent a lot of time with the president. He has even cavalierly discussed the possibility that a war will kill Americans, saying things like, “could our soldiers be hit in the region? Absolutely, they could. Can Iran respond if we have an all-out attack? Absolutely, they can.”

“I think the risk associated with that is far less than the risk associated with blinking, pulling the plug, and not helping the people as you promised.”

Sen. Graham appears to be arguing that U.S. servicemembers dying on behalf of a war that cannot be properly explained to the American public is an acceptable tradeoff. That’s not surprising from a man who once said we needed to go to war with North Korea over its nuclear program because “if thousands die, they're going to die over there. They're not going to die here” and has casually advocated for blowing Iran “off the map.”

Right-wing talk host Mark Levin, who has a Sunday show on Fox News, has been a relentless one-man propaganda machine for Iranian regime change. Fellow Fox host Sean Hannity does the same, using the recent protests in Iran as an excuse for intervention. “If (the Iranian regime is) foolish enough to doubt President Trump’s resolve, just give Nicolas Maduro a call,” he said.

Then there are the military “experts.” Brett McGurk, a Middle East security adviser in both the Biden and first Trump administrations, has been making the case for war on cable news. Perennial guest Gen. Jack Keane, whose pro-war analysis on Fox dates back to the Afghanistan conflict, is saying in interviews that the “preferred option” is for a “combined U.S. and Israel attack” on Iran to collapse the regime and destroy its ballistic missile capability.

Meanwhile, RS reported in October that Israel’s government was paying social media influencers top dollar to promote its preferred messaging on Gaza and its military position in the region. Israel also wants to manipulate Chat GPT for optimum search results. Today, Americans across the country are getting text messages from Israeli-paid sources who want to chat about their feelings about Israel.

Israel even had U.S. pastors trained as "ambassadors" to preach the good word to their flocks.

When Massie posted that he would push for a constitutionally required congressional vote for any war with Iran, he added, “I’m just here enjoying that peace and quiet in the comments in the moments just before the paid influencers and bots get their message on how to respond to my latest move.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. has amassed more air power in the region than at any time since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Trump said Thursday at his inaugural “Board of Peace” meeting, that Iran “must make a deal. If that doesn’t happen… bad things will happen.”

If that “bad thing” is an Iraq-style regime change war with Iran, there has been no public debate about the wisdom of such a move. With the possible exception of Carlson, most of the original MAGA restrainers who once hoisted Trump’s “America First” flag as their own are either now marginalized or actively hated by the president.

Nor does Trump seem to be listening to regular Americans, who overwhelmingly say they don’t want this war.

Before he was assassinated in September of last year, Charlie Kirk was outspoken about the U.S. not going to war with Iran. He used his podcast to broadcast this message to his vast conservative audience. At the dawn of the new year, however, it seemed that the interventionists had taken over Trump foreign policy, beginning with the invasion of Venezuela that has been largely written off by MAGA as “America First.”

Georgetown University’s Arta Moeni shared an old Charlie Kirk X post on Thursday, adding, “Charlie was a friend & we were in regular contact during the 12-day war as he was working tirelessly behind the scenes to avoid US entanglement in Iran.”

Moeni continued, “My sense was he thought that (President Trump), whom he loved so dearly, was being led on a primrose path to ruin by some bad advisors in the inner circle who were obscuring the truth and shutting out America First voices in the admin.”

Former congressman Matt Gaetz, who was much louder over the summer about his wariness of bombing Iran, also appeared to see a Kirk connection in the administration’s current foreign policy direction.

On Wednesday, Gaetz shared an old clip of Kirk warning against a U.S. war with Iran at the behest of Israel, to which Gaetz simply said, “I miss Charlie.”

Why are these voices, once so integral to Trump’s original MAGA movement in 2016 and his 2024 presidential campaign, now muted? Trump isn’t very ideological. But he does value loyalty. Perhaps the treatment of MTG, Massie, and Paul have been warnings to others, and it’s just been easier for them to join the rest who say Venezuela is not “regime change” and that it did not touch off a “forever war.” Polling like this suggests that MAGA has largely bought that line, and that they don't mind war as long as it's Trump waging it.

The president once listened OG MAGA restrainers, at least some of the time. We might now experience what happens when he talks to none of them, none of the time.