It is only ten months into Donald Trump’s second term, and supporters are already describing his presidency as “epic” and declaring an “Age of Trump.” This second term has been so replete with actions of historic consequence that even the president’s traditional opponents are acknowledging its significance.
Liberal *Politico* published a column noting that Trump “is a force of history,” and Rich Lowry, a subdued never-Trumper in 2016 whose *National Review* once devoted a full issue to defeating Trump, has claimed that Trump “may be on the path to the most consequential presidency since Ronald Reagan’s.”
## Tackling America’s Vexing Problems
Trump’s success thus far is driven by his willingness to tackle the country’s most vexing problems, including securing the southern border, throttling elite universities, removing criminal aliens, and scrapping affirmative action and DEI programs. However, Trump’s June 21, 2025, strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities—Operation Midnight Hammer—remains his defining achievement.
For the first time in over four decades, an American president broke Iran’s campaign of existential hatred of the U.S. and reasserted American dominance in the Middle East. Just as importantly, by neutering Tehran, Trump pushed back against a growing challenge to America’s global leadership from an unexpected faction within his own base.
## The Rise of MAGA “Restraintists”
Immediately after Trump took office, a cadre of influential “America First” MAGA voices emerged—Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Dan Bilzerian, Jake Shields, Nick Fuentes, Dave Smith, Ian Carroll, and others—who were intent on restricting America’s field of action in the world. This bloc of MAGA “Restraintists” varies in its views, yet most members share a strong desire for strict nonintervention abroad and tighter immigration restriction at home. These views are not new in the Republican Party and still carry great resonance.
However, their response to Trump’s attack on Iran suggests something more: an extreme aversion to even the justified exercise of American power, a sentiment previously seen only among the woke Left.
Most Restraintists do not share the extreme white supremacist views of Nick Fuentes, but Fuentes offers a candid summary of their perspective: “America is the seat of the liberal empire that controls the world. And we are enemies of that liberal order because of our ‘old world views.’ And so, to the extent that Russia is rolling that back, or China is rolling that back… then we have to support these causes.”
It is striking how closely this view resembles that of the woke Left. The Restraintists argue against U.S.-dominated “liberal hegemony,” while the far Left argues against U.S.-dominated “globalization.” Both sides see a small group of powerful elites presiding over global politics that suit their interests at the expense of all others, prioritizing knocking the U.S. from its dominant place in this broken world. Little wonder that some critics have dubbed certain Restraintists as the “woke Right.”
## The Intellectual Front of Restraintism
The Restraintists often cloak themselves in a thin veneer of intellectual respectability, drawing on what they call the “realist” school of foreign policy once associated with luminaries like Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, and Kenneth Waltz. Today, however, they look to more controversial figures such as Stephen Walt, Jeffrey Sachs, and John Mearsheimer—the latter proposing that Middle East instability stems from Israel’s undisclosed nuclear weapons. Their logic suggests that balancing Israel’s power by allowing Iran to have a bomb would stabilize the region.
It is remarkable that these “realists” view Iran as capable of peacefully possessing a nuclear weapon despite its consistent threats to destroy Israel (“the little Satan”) and the U.S. (“the great Satan”), and its support for terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Only such a distorted worldview can explain their hysteria in the months leading up to Operation Midnight Hammer.
## Outrage from Prominent Restraintists
Candace Owens, a former Daily Wire podcaster who has called Judaism a “pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons… [and] child sacrifice,” urged U.S. service members to refuse deployment rather than “die in a foreign land.” Libertarian comic and frequent *Joe Rogan Experience* guest Dave Smith took Tehran’s side after Israel’s attack and branded Trump “a war criminal who should spend his life in prison,” mocking him as “the most impotent b***h of a leader imaginable.”
Most memorable was Tucker Carlson, whose shrill voice prognosticated defeat for the U.S., proclaiming, “The first week of a war with Iran could easily kill thousands of Americans. It could also collapse our economy. An attack on Iran could easily become a world war. We’d lose.”
## The Rising Lion Campaign and Online Meltdown
All of this came to a head in June when Israel launched its *Rising Lion* campaign to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program. *National Review*’s Haley Strack summarized Restraintist responses:
– Darryl Cooper said America should “commence airstrikes on Tel Aviv immediately.”
– Nick Fuentes called this “the final battle in Israel’s 50-year reign of terror.”
– Candace Owens accused Israel of “bloodlust” and described it as demonic.
– Matt Stoller dismissed Israel’s “bloodthirsty insanity” as “not our problem.”
– UFC fighter and podcaster Jake Shields declared he was “sick and tired of paying for and fighting Jewish wars” and demanded the destruction of Israel.
– Dan Bilzerian stated, “If I was the president, I would round up every politician supporting Israel and have them all tried for treason.”
This online meltdown over Israel’s and Trump’s attacks on Iran strongly suggests the Restraintists secretly welcome a nuclear Iran. Tucker Carlson’s X post justified Iran’s need for a bomb: “Iran also knows it’s unwise to give up its weapons program entirely. Muammar Gaddafi tried that and wound up sodomized with a bayonet. As soon as Gaddafi disarmed, NATO killed him. Iran’s leaders saw that happen. They learned the obvious lesson.”
## Shared Beliefs with the Woke Left
These frenzied pronouncements reveal that Restraintists share a belief with the woke Left that America’s power must be counterbalanced by fortifying U.S. rivals. After all, Barack Obama toured the world apologizing for America’s postwar leadership and suggested that America should “lead from behind” before empowering Iran with a favorable nuclear agreement and pallets of cash.
All of this amounts to little more than a strategy for diminishing U.S. influence. As journalist Lee Smith observed, “The self-described pro-Trump opposition to Trump’s Iran policy is just Obama in a MAGA skin suit opposed to American exceptionalism and keen to cripple what it believes is truly the world’s most dangerous country: ours.”
When Trump told reporters, “I don’t know what Tucker Carlson is saying,” and then posted on Truth Social, “Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon!,” it was a sweeping rejection of Carlson’s opposition to striking Iran and the Restraintists’ view that America’s global power lacks legitimacy.
## Anti-Israel Animus and Its Strategic Implications
The Restraintist hostility to American power also explains their animosity toward Israel. Hudson Institute senior fellow Rebeccah L. Heinrichs sees their bitter enmity toward Israel (and Jews) as not only immoral but “also strategic.” If Restraintists want to diminish U.S. power in the world, their attacks on Israel make sense.
Few countries have contributed more to America’s victory in the Cold War and to sustaining U.S. hegemony than Israel. For decades, Israel’s battlefield successes highlighted the superiority of U.S. weapons over Soviet arms, saving billions in wasted weapons programs and discouraging Moscow’s mischief worldwide—one of the reasons Ronald Reagan named Israel a “major non-NATO ally” in 1987.
Israeli intelligence was indispensable to U.S. counterterror efforts after the Shah’s overthrow in 1979 and again after 9/11. Israel eased America’s path in the 1991 Gulf War by destroying Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, an act later acknowledged by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney as having “made our job much easier in Desert Storm.” In 2007, Israel repeated the feat by eliminating Syria’s Al-Kibar nuclear reactor.
Even in the current conflict, Israel paved the way for the U.S. to carry out Midnight Hammer by dismantling Hezbollah, leading to the fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, delivering a major setback to the Iran-Russia-China axis in the region. Israel then crippled Iranian air defenses, enabling U.S. B-2 stealth bombers to operate without lethal resistance.
The result was an unprecedented moment in which a sworn enemy lay prostrate before U.S. military power. Given this remarkable level of cooperation and shared sentiment, anti-Israel animus appeals to those, such as Obama and the Restraintists, who seek to roll back America’s global influence.
As reporter Lee Smith writes, “Israel represents American power in the Middle East. Weakening Israel is therefore a way of weakening the United States.”
## Trump’s Rejection of Restraintist Misreading
The Restraintists completely misread Trump’s vision of “America First.” Even before his bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites, Trump’s proposal to rebuild Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” his assassination of Iran’s Qasem Soleimani, his strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen, and his eventual agreement to aid Ukraine’s war effort all attest to his considerable distaste for an American retreat from global affairs.
As Michael Doran, Director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, explained, “From the start, his approach emphasized wielding American power decisively while avoiding prolonged quagmires.”
Thanks to his courage in repudiating some of his own Restraintist supporters, Trump has steered Republicans away from the electoral black hole of perilous global retreat.
## Broader Support for Trump’s Approach
The Restraintist stance remains at odds with American sentiment—especially within the Republican Party and its MAGA base. A GrayHouse poll, reported by the *Washington Free Beacon* immediately after the strikes on Iran, showed that 90 percent of Trump voters supported the attack.
Trump understands that MAGA supporters and the broader American public do not want the country to recoil into a protective shell while Russia and China advance on the world stage. On the Middle East, Doran notes, “Americans… understand that leaving the Middle East altogether and thereby handing control of the global energy markets to China is lunacy.”
After Tucker Carlson accused Trump of betraying his “America First” principles, Trump told *The Atlantic*, “Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First’… I think I’m the one that decides that.”
While Trump’s reprimand might lack the intellectual gravitas of William F. Buckley—who paved the way for the Reagan Revolution by warning conservatives against the “crackpot alley” of the John Birch Society—it is no less politically significant. We have a president who tells the Restraintist Right, as he did in July on Truth Social, “Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats’ work… I don’t want their support anymore! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
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*By Seth Forman, Associate Editor at The American Spectator*
https://spectator.org/trump-steers-conservatives-away-from-crackpot-alley/
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