IN A previous article I described my response to Israel’s attack on Iran and some of the criticism of that attack coming from the alleged Right. Part of that article mentioned Tucker Carlson and his increasingly strident demands that Trump should distance the US administration from Israel’s actions.
In Carlson’s narrative, which has been expanded and repeated since my last comments, Trump is being influenced by malign forces to go to another unnecessary and disastrous war.
The Tucker position, which is shared by Steve Bannon, is a very simple one: this is a foreign war identical with every neocon perpetual war, it’s dangerous, it’s unnecessary, and it’s sponsored by malign forces against true US interests.
Tucker has asked how it is ‘America First’ to engage in this foreign war after all the other expensive pointless war disasters, and Trump bluntly replied that since he invented the phrase America First he gets to decide how it applies. But Trump’s more specific point on the Israeli-Iran conflict is an even more blunt denial of Tucker’s doom-laden analysis. There could hardly be a more direct hit of what we might call Tuckersonian isolationism than this:
So on the surface level both attitudes are very simple reductions – in the Tuckerverse, helping Israel means falling for another disastrous perpetual war, huge expense, no gain, pointless slaughter, and Trump as Netanyahu’s unwitting puppet serving Wicked Jew interests.
Trump’s position is just as simple. In the Trumpverse Iran was just about to complete the creation of 15 nuclear bombs, and that simply cannot be allowed to happen given the nature of the Iranian regime and the expressed, explicit desire of Iranian leaders to destroy not just Israel, but the US too.
Many of those MAGA supporters who favour alternative media and have done so for a considerable time tend to side with Carlson on this and see the Israel-Hamas-Iran series of conflicts as simply another iteration of the neocon perpetual wars of the military industrial complex. Trump loyalists in MAGA unite with more Establishment Republicans for the first time in a long time in seeing the Israeli strikes on Iran as necessary and the argument for US intervention as much clearer than the one that applies in the case of Ukraine.
My purpose here is not to present a justification of Israel’s actions. For me those justifications are obvious (response to October 7th in the Hamas phase, response to imminent Iranian nuclear missile capacity in the Iran phase) and glaring. My purpose here is to understand why Trump and Tucker, once on the same side, now differ, which seems a smaller purpose but describes a bigger political chasm. Because it applies to more than just Tucker and even more than just the MAGA split on Israel and Iran. It applies to every misinterpretation of Trump ever advocated.
Trump has almost zero ideological content. Trump is not looking for the Perfect Ideological Fit. He has it already, and it’s called America. He’s all indomitable self-belief and very simple patriotism. It’s expressed almost entirely in the two main slogans of his life in politics. America First, and Make America Great Again. That’s it. He means both, and there is nothing else attached to either. He’s not a Zionist. He’s not an Anti Zionist. He’s not a Democrat. He’s not a Republican. He’s not a Free Trade Fetishist, and he’s not a Crazy Lunatic. He’s not a lover of Nato, and he’s not a servant of the UN. He’s not a Conspiracy Theorist, and he’s not an Establishment Stooge. He’s not Perfect, and he’s not a Monster.
He’s a pragmatist in an age of mad ideas.
Those of us on the Right who had a period of respect for Tucker, like Tucker, and like Trump, noted that the Democrat Party had gone insane. We noticed them becoming crazy ideologues. It wasn’t difficult to spot. Genitally mutilating children as a new industry? Importing savage rapists and cartel gang members and calling it the American Dream? Letting fentanyl flood in or letting the pharmaceutical industry poison an entire generation and force dangerous experiments on everyone? Taking away free speech? Turning a scumbag thug like George Floyd into a martyr and Saint? Rigging elections? Saying all white people are born evil and calling that anti-racism? Saying that men are women? Building trillions in debt while funding trans opera in Guatemala? Bombing Iraq on false WMD claims and pushing for nuclear war with Russia?
Most of those made it very obvious to anyone capable of thought and reason that the mainstream has gone mad, that the media were and are activist lying partisans, that the respectable was no longer worthy of respect because it had itself become a kind of extremism. And Tucker, bless his lost and wandering soul, was right when he stumbled on to that particular revelation. He just didn’t have enough substance in himself to refuse the Next Revelation, to tell when a new friend is talking shit or when an old argument doesn’t apply in a fresh context. What does Trump have that Tucker doesn’t?
He knows an Iran with a nuke is a stupid idea.
Trump’s lack of ideology, his simplicity, his hard-headed, totally pragmatic, completely common-sense grounding in reality and innate character-deep, DNA-deep distrust of bullshit can be deceived by flattery and deception from people he has mistaken for allies, as it was by covid architects of evil. But generally it gives a much better guide than ANY ideological construct does.
Trump is not an ideological purist. He’s a pragmatic common-sense patriot. In many ways, and ironically, it makes him more moderate than anyone else, both those who have always hated him, and those who switch between love and disillusionment. They are judging by ideals and emotion, whereas Trump functions by common sense and results.
Look at Trump’s critics and they are always idealists rather than pragmatists, and this includes those who Oppose All Wars and those who Support All Wars. It even includes most of those who enrich themselves. Even the corrupt are generally corrupt ideologues, whose Abstract Principles and arcane theories matter to them. Soros is not just a crook. He is a believer. An Open Society, Open Borders fanatic. Obama wasn’t just a crook. He was genuinely a Marxist (all Marxists have always been able to exclude their own property and wealth from the equation). Climate Change is not just a grift, it’s also a cult. Globalists aren’t just purchased national traitors, they believe the insane abstractions they force on others. Even Establishment conservatives who fetishise Nato, howl for more Ukraine intervention, or went wild with grief when Trump used tariffs, do so because the 1945 settlement, the rules based international order, the mantra of free trade, the Cold War thinking and the Russophobia, have all become respectable fixations, ideological identity props, and part of an Abstract Whole.
Trump has just one abstraction, one ideology. America. The USA and the obvious interests of most of its people is the sum of his ideology. A war with Russia over Ukraine, nuclear exchange? Are you NUTS? How does that benefit the US? Russia already has nukes. Be a bit more realistic.
A war to prevent Iran getting nukes? The Iran that says Death to America? Someone else is doing the fighting for us? They are doing it well? We aren’t wasting money and we get people who would nuke us removed and that threat ended? And you oppose that . . . are you NUTS?
This is why Trump called Tucker a kook. Trump is not a sockless wanderer. Trump knows where he stands. He isn’t on a rightwing version of a hippy journey of self-discovery, like Carlson is. He doesn’t judge anything by abstract principles and an entire portmanteau worldview handed to him by others. Whether you are a radical leftist, an alternative rightist, a rich Globalist or a traditional conservative, you are applying a whole set of fixed attitudes Trump doesn’t share. And the alternative viewpoint can become, has become, just as fixed, ideological and inflexible as the mainstream it initially rebelled against.
To think that every intervention is noble, and to think that every intervention is corrupt, is to be in one sense the same person, an ideologue. A purist living by abstractions. You aren’t looking at causes, contexts, and consequences. Your general abstract principle explains it all for you. Trump meanwhile is looking at the real world directly, with only one abstract applied – does this make America safer, stronger, richer, or doesn’t it? Would a common-sense person want Iran to have nukes? The simplicity of a pragmatist is nearly always smarter than the sophistication of an idealist.
Trump won’t go to war for Democracy, but he can see that stopping Iran having nukes makes perfect sense.
And he can see too that providing a 30,000lb Mother of All Bombs to take out the key Iranian nuclear weapon site makes more sense than 20 years of patrolling the sand, flies and shit of Afghanistan.
A longer version of this article appeared in Jupplandia on June 17, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
