“No one should have to die for a foreign country”, Megyn Kelly, Maga podcaster and former Fox News host, said on Monday after Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran.
And just five days into the conflict, the deaths of six US servicemen were a sharp reminder for Americans of the realities of war.
The question of whether the US president, who campaigned on an isolationist ticket, was right to enter into an open-ended conflict in the Middle East has been asked endlessly by political analysts, talking heads and journalists since the first strikes were launched on Tehran on Saturday.
Nationwide, the response to the conflict among the American voter base has been almost exactly evenly split. According to conservative pollsters OnMessage, 49 per cent of Americans were found to be in favour of the war, while 48 per cent opposed it, Politico reported.
Mr Trump’s own favourability in the same poll, seen by The Telegraph, was considerably less even, with 54 per cent of the 1,800 people polled viewing him negatively, and 45 per cent positively.
Meanwhile, a Fox News poll of 1,004 registered voters also found a 50-50 split amongst Americans over support for the war.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Sunday found that one in four people supported strikes. There was an even split between the 1,282 people polled over whether the president was too willing to use military force.
And beyond the American voter base, Mr Trump’s cabinet divided over who started the war, and the motivation behind the attacks.
The US president maintains he feared the Iranian regime would launch a strike on American forces in the region. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, appeared to contradict Mr Trump’s claim on Monday by suggesting that Israel was the driving force behind the war.
“Typically, what happens at the very beginning of these kind of major combat operations is the public will rally around the president, and we will see significant, if not overwhelming, support for the action,” Prof Matthew Dallek, of George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, told The Telegraph.
He pointed out that in the most recent polls, there is “no rally round the flag effect”. The sustained bombardment of Iran is “politically far riskier than anything Trump has done on foreign policy.”
“American voters are increasingly indifferent about wars,” Nate Silver, a top US pollster, suggests in a recent blog post, “until and unless there are attacks on American soil, large numbers of casualties among American troops, or a draft”.
Other polls suggest Americans may, in fact, care more about Iran than other historic US interventions.
A CNN poll of 1,004 people found 71 per cent were following events closely or somewhat closely, lower than the June 2025 strike when the US attacked three nuclear facilities in Iran, in which around 80 per cent of people were following it. During the first few days of the Ukraine war, some 79 per cent of people were following the conflict.
An inflamed Maga base may also be an indication that Iran is different. Along with Ms Kelly’s comments, on Tuesday, Mike Cernovich, a pro-Trump influencer, turned on the administration, saying: “Rubio’s comments are a record scratch moment. He said what most guessed was the case. That he said [this] out loud … is a sea change in foreign policy. There will be massive calls for a walk-back.”
Tucker Carlson, a prominent Maga personality and one of Trump’s biggest supporters, described the attack on Iran as “absolutely disgusting and evil”, and said that “this is Israel’s war”.
Many interpreted Mr Trump’s America First policy as “no more foreign wars”, Prof Dallek said. Whether Mr Trump has stuck to that begs another question of interpretation.
The US has so far made only two tentative ventures into foreign conflicts: striking Iran in June last year and, most recently, when it declared war on drug traffickers and made repeated forays into the Caribbean and Latin America.
On Thursday, the Pentagon announced a joint military operation with Ecuador to crack down on drug gangs in the country.
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