Stephen Hawkins analyzes President Trump's fractured coalition, revealing that 25 to 30% of the "reluctant right" are reconsidering support due to economic fears and tepid enthusiasm. While MAGA hardliners back decisive action against Iran, factions like anti-woke conservatives worry about regional expansion, a sentiment echoed by counterterrorism official Joe Kent's resignation. The discussion highlights internal Republican divisions over potential regime change versus ground troop deployment, with Hawkins warning that sustained conflict could severely damage the president's popularity ahead of the midterms. [Automatically generated summary]
Rothschilds all maintaining super wealth from control of our banking and treasury systems.
What about that fraud?
That's a huge fraud in 1940 against the American people.
Let's change that.
Last comment, Tom?
Not something we've looked into, but maybe it should.
But as I said, there are a lot of issues out there that need to be addressed.
That's Thomas Schatz.
He is the president of Citizens Against Government Waste.
You can visit their website at CAGW.org.
Tom, thanks as always for joining us today.
Thank you, Mimi.
Welcome back to Washington Journal.
Joining us now is Stephen Hawkins.
He is the Global Director of Research at the organization More in Common, and he's here to talk about a really interesting study into President Trump's GOP coalition and the reaction to the war in Iran.
Good morning, Stephen.
Good morning, Taylor.
Thanks for being here.
So first off, for people not familiar with More in Common, describe your organization, how it's funded, what type of work you do.
If you ask Americans today to describe the country in one word, they typically use the word divided.
We're all concerned about polarization in this country.
More in Common was founded in the United States in 2018 to try and understand better what's going on in the country in terms of people's psychology and values, why we're so divided, and what we can do about it.
We're now operating in seven countries around the world.
We have over 75 staff.
And the main thing that we do is we just talk to people in large scale to try and understand their perspective on the issues of our time and to then advise media, political parties, governments, philanthropy, and what they can do about it.
You recently finished up a major study specifically into President Trump's coalition, the MAGA movement, if you will, make America great again for people unfamiliar.
Why did you want to look at that in the first place?
This might be the most important population on earth right now.
What this group of people, President Trump supporters, will tolerate, will support, will enthusiastically stay behind will define what this presidency is about.
And so understanding what their fracture points are, what they're motivated by, why they support President Trump is an absolutely central question of our moment.
What's really interesting is you divide up the president's coalition into four different voter types.
I think we could put them up on screen.
You have what you call MAGA hardliners, anti-woke conservatives, mainline Republicans, and reluctant right.
Can you dive, kind of give a top line or two for each of them?
Sure.
The MAGA hardliners are kind of the prototypical Trump supporter that you might imagine from rallies.
These are people who really like President Trump.
They're enthusiastic about him.
They're fans of President Trump.
These are people who don't just believe that President Trump is a good leader.
They think he's the best leader the Republican Party has had in their lifetime.
They're also people who bring more of their identity into their politics and into the support for President Trump.
For instance, with the MAGA hardliners in particular, they will say that they think that God saved President Trump's life so that he can make America great again at high rates.
They bring their faith in their politics together.
They're older, they're white, on large, 89, 90%.
And then you have the anti-woke conservatives, and this group is also demographically similar.
They're older and they're more white, but they are more affluent, they're more educated, they keep their faith and their politics apart, and they see Trump as almost an instrument of opposition to block the progressive left, the woke agenda that they decry and dislike.
And they're politically engaged.
Then you have the mainline Republicans that you mentioned.
The mainline Republicans could also sort of be referred to as a default Republican.
These are people who aren't particularly politically engaged, but if you ask them, they're a Republican.
They support President Trump, but they're not following the news cycle day to day or maybe even week to week.
And then you have the reluctant right, and the reluctant right is probably the most consequential group in the coalition right now, not because they're the most engaged.
Many of them aren't following the news super closely, but because they have tepid support for President Trump.
Many of them voted for Trump in 2024 only because they thought he was the better option relative to Kamala Harris and because they were concerned about the economy and immigration.
Now the Republican, I'm sorry, now the reluctant right are reconsidering some of them.
As many as 25, 30% of that group is starting to have hesitations around their support for President Trump.
So as the conversation about the midterms proceeds, it'll be the group to watch.
You talked about how this overall coalition you think is kind of an extremely important group to track in this moment.
Explain a bit more for people wondering where they may fall into those different categories that you just outlined, the value, at least from your organization's perspective, of grouping them.
Because people might say, hey, voters are not monoliths, voting groups are not monoliths.
So what value have you gained from understanding the coalition and breaking it down in that way?
Well, first of all, if you go to beyondmaga.us, you can actually take the typology quiz yourself and find out which of the four groups you belong to.
So if you're curious, it just takes a few minutes to do, and we're transparent about the questions that construct that typology.
The value of it is that too often, in general, we think in terms of red and blue.
We think in terms of Democrat, Republican, Independent.
And what More in Common does is we work with social psychologists and political scientists who help us to see more granularity and frankly more humanity within these big populations so that we don't just work with a default stereotype or a caricature of the other side.
And through the process of this research, we didn't just survey people, we met them.
And we did focus groups with dozens of people as well as long-form, in-depth interviews with them.
And it taught all of our research team more than we expected and also opened up relationships that we didn't have before.
Because this data is so interesting, we've changed up our phone lines for this and we've divided them up in a different way for this conversation.
So for people listening at home, if you consider yourself to be a MAGA Trump voter, we want you to call 202-748-8000.
If you are a Trump voter but you don't consider yourself MAGA, we want you to call 202-748-8001.
If you are not in either of those camps, we still want to hear from you.
We want you to call 202-748-8002.
You could also text us here at C-SPAN at 202-748-8003.
We'd love to hear from the broader group.
Joe Kent's War Rationale00:15:18
Now, let's talk about today is three weeks since the war against Iran was launched.
And it's been striking to see specifically among President Trump's base opinions on this war and whether or not it aligns with what the president campaigned on.
How have you been gauging the response to that as it factors into all this research you've done?
We asked Trump voters how they would describe President Trump and we gave them a big long list of positive and negative words.
And the words that stand out the most are strong and leader.
And where his on issues where President Trump has been most successful in maintaining enthusiasm from his base are on issues of foreign policy and on immigration.
So if you look at the intervention in Iran through that prism, it's a smart move on President Trump's behalf to take a decisive, strong leadership move in trying to topple a regime which quite uniformly Trump voters view not just as bad but as evil.
However, the Trump coalition does not want long lengthy wars.
They do want strong economic performance.
They do not want boots on the ground.
And so what in the short term, a narrow intervention, could have been popular.
And in fact, it seems he lost no support whatsoever for his intervention in removing Nicolas Maduro from power in Venezuela.
But a sustained medium-term or even long-term engagement in Iran could prove very challenging for him to maintain his popularity through.
To that point, we've seen over the course of this week the first senior administration official resign in protest of this war.
His name was Joe Kent.
He was a top counterterrorism official.
We've also seen a lot of a spotlight on Vice President JD Vance because he's a military veteran himself.
He has been very outspoken in years past about his frustrations with prolonged conflicts in the Middle East.
He was at an event in Michigan earlier this week and he was asked about the resignation of that counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, in protest of the Iran war.
Here's that exchange.
Joe Kent resigned from his post over his objection to the war in Iran.
He was among those Republicans who was pretty dedicated to Trump's agenda and the mega movement.
So how does his exit speak to the fracture of that coalition over the war?
And what can you say to those who deeply believe in the president's agenda but are really worried about the consequences of what the war in Iran holds?
Well, look, I mean, the president has said this, I've said this, nobody likes war, right?
And I guarantee you the president of the United States is not interested in getting us, you know, in the kind of long-term quagmires that we've seen in years past.
I know the president.
I know the way that he thinks about America's national security.
That is not a risk with this president at all.
What he has also said consistently for 10, 15 years, maybe even longer, is Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon and he's willing to take action, diplomatic, ideally, but military action if he has to to make sure that that doesn't happen.
That's all this is about.
We don't want the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon.
The president's been clear about this and that's what led to the president's decision of what, about three weeks ago.
Now you asked about Joe Kent.
Now I know Joe Kent a little bit.
I like Joe Kent.
You heard the President of the United States say yesterday that he likes Joe Kent too.
But it's one thing to have a disagreement of opinion.
I know the president very well.
He welcomes differences of opinion.
He likes it when people express their views about what should happen.
He listens to everybody.
It's one of the great things I like about him is that whether you're the gardener at Mar-a-Lago or whether you're the Secretary of the State, the President cares about what you think about an issue.
He recognizes that everybody has smarts and everybody has wisdom.
That said, whatever your view is, when the President of the United States makes a decision, it's your job to help make that decision as effective and successful as possible.
And so the President said this yesterday, if you are on the team and you can't help implement the decisions of his administration, he has the right to make those decisions, then it's a good thing for you to resign.
And I think that's exactly right.
It's fine to disagree, but once the president makes a decision, it's up to everybody who serves in his administration to make it as successful as possible.
That's how I do my job.
And I think that's how everybody in the administration should do their job too.
So Stephen, what did you make of the Vice President's public defense of this war and his reaction to Kent's resignation?
What is the decision that the president made here?
That's what he's referencing here.
He made the decision.
We stand by the decision.
What's the decision?
In 2025, the United States acted with Israel to destroy using bunker-busting missiles, almost the totality of, if not all of, the Iranian nuclear development facilities and uranium enrichment facilities.
This was a different action.
This was not the targeting of the nuclear facilities in Iran.
This was the removal and killing of the head of state and many of his closest allies.
So what is the decision?
Is the decision that there's going to be regime change?
If that's the decision, then it won't be sufficient for us to bomb from afar.
There will very likely need to be ground troops that come in and help facilitate a change in government.
And that would be extremely costly, both politically, militarily.
We saw this week already a $200 billion request for additional funding from the Pentagon.
So if that's the decision, regime change, well, then we'll see if that's what something that JD Vance is willing to stand behind.
It won't be popular with the American people.
It won't be popular even with President Trump's base.
Among Republicans, less than 20% are in favor of ground troops.
So if the decision instead is just to bomb the country as a signal of the United States' opposition to this administration, well, that's already happened.
The question is, what happens next?
Let's turn to some callers now.
We have Arthur calling in from here in Washington, D.C., on the all-other line.
As a reminder, we've divided up the phone lines for self-identified MAGA Trump voters, Trump voters who are non-MAGA, and all others.
Good morning, Arthur.
You're on with our guest.
Hey, good morning.
I just wanted to ask if you could speak to the Mufti.
I know it hasn't really been mentioned anywhere, and I'm reading a document that ties the regime in Iran to the Albana Mufti coalition that worked with Nazis, actually.
So I'm just wondering if you could speak to that, please.
Stephen, do you have anything on that?
I'm going to have to pass on that one, Taylor.
That's fair.
We could dive into that at a different time.
Let's go to Stan calling in from New York, who called in on the MAGA Trump voter line.
Good morning, Stan.
You're on with our guest.
Yeah, hey, how are you doing?
Can you hear me?
We can.
Good morning.
Good morning.
So, yeah, I truthfully agree with the war in Iran, if that's what you want to call it, a war.
If it has to be war, to me, it sounds like to me, it has to be war.
You know, Iran has been carrying on for a long, long time.
And I don't think, you know, you just can't let that go.
Just keep going.
It's just not do nothing.
You know, because they seem to be really extreme.
I've heard their ideas and their ideology.
They want to, you know, they feel the world should be Islamic.
And so, you know, and not only that, with their weapons and what they say they're doing with the nuclear weapons and everything like that.
I suppose a lot of people feel like, oh, well, why are we doing that?
We're way over here.
You know, we're not over there.
We should mind our business and all like that.
But it is our business because eventually they will come up with the technology to find bombs to reach us.
Not to mention, a lot of them are here and they could start some mess here.
So we have to get involved with that.
You know, it's not only Israel.
A lot of people feel like, oh, well, we're doing it for Israel.
I don't think so.
So, yeah.
Thank you for that, Stan.
To build on that, Stephen, let's talk about the rationale for this current conflict because even the president's daily public remarks sometimes shift the goalposts for why he initially decided to launch this, how he is justifying it continuing.
What has stood out to you in terms of how his supporters are reacting to that?
Are they aligned with Stan and saying, we believe this threat is there, or are you noticing some fracturing?
Well, it does depend on who you're speaking to.
And so to go back to the four groups, the MAGA hardliners, from what we have been able to see so far, we did some preliminary analysis, but nothing we've published yet.
They're fully with him, and for the same reason that the gentleman Stan calling in just mentioned, which is that it's very easy to recognize that this regime isn't just ugly.
It isn't just an external sponsor of terror.
This is a regime which mistreats its women and restricts their freedoms in a way that almost no other country on earth does.
The IRGC, the military that works with the leadership in Iran, was responsible for the deaths of 45,000 of its own children that it sent to clear minefields in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.
This is an evil regime to much of the Trump coalition, to much of the world.
And so that enthusiasm for the United States playing a role that it has historically in taking on enemies, taking on, frankly, evil regimes, is something which we see support for.
But it's the extent of the effort.
It's the commitment that we're making there which makes people nervous.
The anti-woke conservatives group, the one that's less religious, the group that's well-informed and supportive of Trump, but has a narrower agenda, they're concerned about where this could take us.
We spent over 20 years in Afghanistan.
A 20-year engagement with Iran would be hugely costly for the United States.
And then let's also talk about a potential consequence here.
There are already nine other countries that have been implicated in the region as a result of this war.
From Saudi Arabia to Bahrain to Kuwait to UAE to Iraq.
This is quickly expanding into a regional war, not to mention with Israel.
And so the anti-woke conservatives are concerned not only about how far this might go in terms of continuity, how much, how many this could extend forward into months or years, but how this might grow into a regional or even a global war.
I want to turn to one of the listeners who called in on the non-MAGA Trump voter line.
So this is somebody who voted for the president but does not consider themselves to be MAGA.
This is Rush calling in from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Good morning, Rush.
You're on with our guest.
Yeah, good morning.
I'm writing things down as we go here.
I'm 74 years old, Navy veteran, U.S. steel retiree.
I've called in numerous times here.
Like I say, voted for Trump three times, but he's lost me here.
Number one, just recently, there's two recent things this past week or two.
The Joe Kent thing.
Now, it was okay for Trump to say, you know, well, yeah, he threw the word weak in.
He said, this guy's weak.
This guy served 11.
He was deployed 11 times as a green beret.
He's a gold star husband.
His wife got killed.
I'm sure you're aware of that.
In Syria, a suicide bomber.
He's not weak.
And then I won't get into President Trump's past on going into the military.
Let's drop that.
So Hag said, then recently, three or four days, three days ago, he's got the Japanese prime minister here, that lady.
One of the Japanese reporters asked him why he didn't let them or any other country know before we went in on this.
I still don't think it's a war.
We haven't had a war since World War II.
We haven't declared war on them, I don't think.
But at any rate, and Trump says, well, we didn't let anybody know.
We wanted to keep it top secret.
He said, did you let us know?
No, not us.
Did you let me know about Pearl Harbor?
And people were laughing and stuff.
I'm thinking, you know what?
At least, if I was that reporter, at least the Japanese, Hawaii wasn't a state yet.
I'm sure Trump probably wasn't even aware of that.
They hit a military base.
They didn't hit Los Angeles.
And my response would have been, why didn't you let us know before you hit us with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and wipe out zillions of civilians?
Now, here's a few other ones here.
Now, Israel...
Here, wait, Rush.
I actually, if you don't mind, I want to interrupt because you brought up Joe Kent, and I want to play a clip from a conversation he had with Tucker Carlson, obviously prominent conservative influencer, one of the more MAGA people figures who has broken with the president over this war, sharing many of the frustrations that you were just outlining.
Here's what Joe Kent said to Tucker Carlson after he resigned from his position.
You're saying that there was no intelligence that you saw with the highest level clearance, obviously, involved in this conversation that showed an imminent threat from Iran to the United States?
No.
No, unless we took certain actions, unless we came after them in a way that they thought threatened the regime, then we basically knew what they were going to do.
Well, right, of course.
Right, but like any country.
So if you attack any country, we know that they're going to have a reaction.
We face an imminent threat once we attack you.
Yeah, exactly.
But there was no intelligence that said, hey, on whatever day it was, March 1st, the Iranians are going to launch this big sneak attack.
They're going to do some kind of a 9-11 Pearl Harbor, et cetera.
They're going to attack one of our bases.
There was none of that intelligence.
Again, back to what we know about the Iranians.
They're very, very deliberate with the escalation ladder.
And again, they're only deliberate under President Trump's leadership because they knew and they took President Trump very, very seriously.
Stephen, let's talk both about what Mr. Kent just outlined and is alleging based on the rationale for this decision to go to war, but also what Rush was just telling us as a three-time Trump voter saying this kind of crosses a line for me and he's confused about the handling of it.
What are your takeaways from those two thoughts?
Well, Kent is correct on this position.
I mean, last year, the United States attacked the nuclear facilities in Iran specifically to address that nuclear threat.
That was handled then.
That's a very different effort than trying to change the government or decapitate the government in Iran.
It does look like Joe Kent has the evidence on his side there in terms of what the imminent threat is.
The president hasn't laid out what the imminent threat would have been to the United States or to Israel and what the imminence of that would have looked like in terms of missile attacks.
We saw then in 2025 during the Israel-Iran war that took place in June, that Israel was able to defend itself.
Almost every single missile that was shot at it from Iran was deflected.
Consistency in Leadership Claims00:13:43
And so the rationale simply can't be one of survival.
That can't be what it is.
That can't be the motivation that the president is trying to make to the American people about why we're in Iran.
It has to be something about the ideology of the Iranian regime or the treatment of the Iranian regime of its people.
But the imminence of the threat isn't, it's not a case he's even tried to make.
Our next caller is from the great state of Texas, Robert called in on the self-identified MAGA Trump voter line.
Robert, good morning.
You're on with our guest.
Thank you for taking my call.
I feel I'm a very well-read individual with my favorite president being FDR.
And FDR made one of the most historic speeches on what is called Day of Infamy.
So today I want to talk about the Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, because everything he says is false.
He went on the network and said he compared January 6th to the eradication of the Pacific Fleet.
That was his assertion.
He was on CNBC and the hosts were actually rolling their eyes about him, making his financial assertions.
In New York 8, he got 168,000 votes in the district of 750,000 or about 25%.
He vehemently opposes Trump on everything, yet everyone in his party voted for Iran as responsible for terror.
So here's my question.
Do you think Hakeem Jeffries should resign in disgrace?
So Stephen, let's talk about more broadly to Robert's point, how the Democrats have been responding to this.
There were a few notable Democrats, I think of Ohio Congressman Greg Lansman, a prominent Jewish Democrat who spent a lot of time in the Middle East.
He initially came out sort of in support of this conflict, but just yesterday he released a statement saying it's time to wrap it up.
I feel we've accomplished what we've accomplished.
What has stood out to you in the broader Democratic Party's messaging on this?
And is there a chance that you think they could appeal to any tier of the breakdown of Trump voters that you've done in your research?
I think so, especially if this war continues.
Now, yesterday, we're speaking on Saturday, on Friday, President Trump said that he's considering winding down this engagement, right?
What that looks like exactly, I don't know.
It won't look like a change in regime.
That seems like it's not currently really even on the table.
So what it will look like is a massive destruction of much of Iran's military and political apparatus, as well as attacking additional missile and nuclear facilities.
It will look like much damage done to the Middle East and the United States leaving without much to show for the engagement.
I think that the Democratic Party will try to capitalize on that by showing that the president's priorities are not on the economy, which is where the reluctant right voters, which are the ones that Democrats will be looking to pull in their direction ahead of the 2026 midterms, his priorities aren't aligned with theirs.
The Trump administration, specifically figures like the Vice President, the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, they have made a point over the last week or two to try to make clear to people, we do not think this is going to be an endless war and then contradict what the president is saying.
We have a clip of Hegseth talking about that specifically and why he thinks this operation is different.
Hear it from me, one of hundreds of thousands who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, who watched previous foolish politicians like Bush, Obama, and Biden squander American credibility.
This is not those wars.
President Trump knows better.
Epic Fury is different.
It's laser-focused.
It's decisive.
Our objectives, given directly from our America first president, remain exactly what they were on day one.
These are not the media's objectives, not Iran's objectives, not new objectives.
Our objectives.
Unchanged, on target, and on plan.
Stephen, how do you think that message will resonate to the president's coalition, to his base?
Notice that he doesn't say what the objectives are.
The objectives have remained unchanged.
What are they?
There is still an Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.
It's just moved from father to son.
I think the base, in terms of the MAGA hardliners that we identify, the 29%, as well as the 30% we refer to as the mainline Republicans, they will largely stay with the president, I suspect, through this, at least for another month, six weeks, two months potentially, because they are loyal to him, because they believe that he is genuinely motivated by a desire to help this country, not a desire to advance himself.
But the more conversation there is about troops on the ground, and there have been now 2,500 Marines deployed to the region this week, the more conversation there is about how this is changing, gas prices, how this is going to have an effect not just on the U.S. economy, but on the global economy, the harder it is going to be for the president to continue to maintain support for this war among his base.
Let's hear now from Darrell calling in from the great state of Nevada.
He phoned in on the line for all others, so not a self-identified MAGA Trump supporter or a non-MAGA Trump supporter.
Good morning, Darrell.
Good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
My question for Mr. Hawkins would be, why now?
I would like to know what the GOP coalition thinks about the question why now.
That is, the callers that have called in before that said that Iran was a terrorist country.
Yes, that's true.
We've been at war for 47 years.
Yes, that's true.
All of those things are true.
But as Mr. Hawkins pointed out, it had earlier been pointed out that there was no imminent threat.
And so I would like to know what they think about that.
Because gasoline prices have gone up.
Independent truckers are going out of business.
And the other thing is this.
There's a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things.
If your house has termites, I can get rid of the termites in four hours with a gallon of gasoline in a match.
But that's not the way to do it.
So thank you very much for taking my thoughts.
Thanks so much.
Your thoughts?
I think there are two narratives here.
One is that the Iranian people very heroically were in the streets in large numbers getting killed by this regime for having the temerity to want to have some role in the governance of their own society.
And those protests were at a place of growing bloodshed, and that that was the instigation for President Trump intervening at the time that he did.
The other narrative, and one that polling this week has shown that a slight majority of Americans also perceive, is that this was an effort to change the subject.
The primary subject that was leading headlines in major newspapers immediately prior to this engagement three weeks ago was the Epstein files, was President Trump's personal implications in what was a pedophile sex ring run by Jeffrey Epstein, and particularly things that happened in the 1980s.
Now, even as many as one in four Republicans believes that this might have been partly the decision to attack Iran might have been partly motivated by a desire to change the subject from that investigation, which continues to be discussed and which is, or the files are still being reviewed by Congress and by the public.
We will see if that continues to be a big part of the discussion and whether Democrats continue to push on the Epstein files as a way of damaging President Trump.
But those are the two lenses through which I think this moment can be understood.
Let's hear from Bob calling in from Ruskin, Florida.
He called in on the non-MAGA Trump voter line.
Good morning, Bob.
Hi, good morning.
Yeah, I was in the military 26 years.
I went in in 1979 and I saw the beginning of the Ayatollah.
Then I deployed to Baghdad, Iraq, and I fought against Saddam regime, and I saw the insurgents come afterwards.
You know, one, to say that Epstein and what he did has anything to do with this war is absurd.
Second of all, you know, does Mr. Hawkins have anything positive to talk about that America is doing to stop a nuclear bomb from spreading throughout the war by this Iran regime?
So, Stephen, let's build on that.
We've talked a lot about the rationale and how the president's messaging might be confusing even members of his own base.
Do you think to Bob's point there is a legitimate case there that might be resonating with some of the president's supporters?
Because we have seen some polling that shows, especially for the more MAGA-aligned voters, even though it goes against what the president campaigned on saying no more forever wars, no more conflicts overseas, they're behind him on this right now.
Right.
And it isn't a forever war yet.
And so I think, and maybe it never will be.
The positive thing to say, to respond to the caller, is that this is a regime that doesn't have the legitimacy of its people, that has been an opponent of the rights of women, of freedom of speech, of freedom of religion.
For any patriotic American who believes that American values ought to be universal, that people ought to have not just a right to speak and to practice a religion of their own choosing, and that men and women ought to have the ability to live the lives they want, but that they should actually be able to have some say in the governance of your country.
This should be an enemy of the United States.
And so, insofar as President Trump has taken on the Iranian regime, he's taken on a worthy enemy.
So, that's a positive thing to say.
The question is whether that enemy will actually be defeated or whether we'll just morph into a version of the same ideology, effectively the same people preserving this regime with just the most recent layer of leadership decapitated.
We might not actually be able to uproot the Islamic regime.
And in fact, that looks to be the case in Iran.
And so, the question is just what is the objective that the president is pursuing here, and will he have the determination to see it through?
Let's hear from one more caller.
I want to bring up Candace from the Buckeye State, Ohio, calling in on the MAGA Trump voter line.
Candice, if you could only take about 30 seconds so we could have time for our guests to respond, what would you like to say?
Wow.
First of all, people that this imminent threat, I mean, people are really, do they really think that we should wait until Iran points a nuclear weapon at us?
I mean, the term imminent threat is so broad because this regime has been attacking us for almost 50 years.
And second, Trump, nobody seems to understand that Trump has got President Trump, has got over 100 reasons why this is happening now.
And if people think it's because of the Epstein files, which President Trump brought back to light, is ridiculous.
There are so many reasons why this is happening.
For him to divulge strategies or that's telling, he might as well call Iran and tell them his secrets as to what's happening or what's going to happen.
So that's ridiculous, too.
I don't need to know what his reasons are.
I've followed President Trump for 40 years, and I've just, you can see from all of the past videos, he has been consistent with his feelings about Trump or about Iran.
Thank you so much, Candace.
I really appreciate that insight.
As a closing point, clearly she falls into that MAGA column that is behind this war right now.
What stands out to you in our last minute?
Let's talk about consistency in this president, which was the caller's claim.
This is a president who, just in January, two months ago, in his State of the Union, said that he had ended eight wars, said that it was we would be measured not just by the wars that we win, but most importantly, by the wars that we don't get into.
That was President Trump two months ago this year.
Let's remember, this is a president who sought the Nobel Peace Prize.
Let's remember, this is a president who is critical of the war in Iran, critical of forever wars in general.
In terms of consistency, we'll see if he's able to maintain that.
He's in a difficult position now between having to pull back from a war which is far from finished and persisting in one that will be very unpopular for him and might have significant economic damage.
The thing the president can do to allay concerns that the country has and that his base might have is to be precise about the objectives.
JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, they're both saying the same thing, which is that the president is consistent, the president has made himself clear and is unwavering.
What are the objectives?
Lastly, for you, the midterm elections are in November.
The president won't be on the ballot, but his team has said they're treating it as if he is.
Midterm Election Impact on Congress00:00:39
Do you think this could have an impact for how Republicans in Congress fare in their re-election bids?
88% of the time since World War II, the president's party has lost some power in Congress during midterm elections.
14 out of 16 elections.
It's happened in this century only once.
It was after September 11th, George W. Bush's Republican Party was able to gain some seats.
So, from a statistical standpoint, independent of the context, President Trump is likely with the Republican Party to lose seats in the House.
We'll see what happens in the Senate.
How badly this or positively this affects his popularity probably won't change that outcome, which is.