As the nation’s premier annual gathering of right-wing activists, the Conservative Political Action Conference often illuminates potential problems on the right before they go mainstream. This year, that problem is President Donald Trump’s war on Iran. And it’s big enough that one can’t help but wonder if the intra-MAGA strife over the issue is why Trump chose to skip the event for the first time since 2016.
Many speakers at CPAC this weekend raised concerns about the war in Iran — and the rifts it was causing in Trump’s base. According to The New York Times, former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida “worried that Republicans were entering the midterm elections ‘with self-inflicted wounds.’” Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said Republican voters had to decide what “America First actually stands for.” Even Erik Prince — the notorious former CEO of the Blackwater mercenary group, some of whose employees massacred civilians in Iraq — issued harsh judgment of Trump’s Middle East adventurism during a panel. “I counseled as loud as possible against doing this in the first place,” he said, before warning he doesn’t “think people are really prepared” for “burning American warships.”
If I were an adviser briefing the president, I’d point out the air of anxiety that hung over the event this year.
It wasn’t just panelists. Among attendees, there was a highly visible split over Trump’s war on Iran, with activists either expressing unwavering faith in Trump or describing his war of choice as a betrayal of a key campaign promise.
One interesting data point reporters from The Guardian, Politico and BBC observed was a generational split among attendees’ views on Iran, with younger activists significantly more likely to criticize Trump over the war. “He’s lied about everything,” Joseph Bolick, a 30-year-old veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and voted for Trump in 2025, told Politico. “If you go into a war where there’s no end game, how is it going to end? There’s no clear objective.”
The generational division at the conference tracks with recent polling data. A Politico poll conducted March 13-18 of nearly 4,000 adults found that, among self-identified MAGA Republicans, more than 70% of respondents older than 35 believed Trump had a plan in Iran, but only 49% under the age of 35 felt the same. Older Americans were also significantly more likely to support sacrificing American lives for the war, and to say that the war aligned with MAGA principles and the interests of American people.
Greater skepticism among young Republicans makes intuitive sense: Older Republicans grew up with the mythology of Cold War triumphalism; young Republicans came up with the failures of the war on terror and botched nation-building projects. For older Republicans, Trump’s criticism of forever wars was a departure from a long-standing bipartisan consensus that America was a virtuous global cop that was entitled to put any country in its place. But for younger Republicans, Trump’s criticism of forever wars was aligned with the common sense of their political coming of age, after the public soured on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also seems plausible that younger Republicans, with lower income and wealth than older ones, are more sensitive to the idea that this war is unacceptably exacerbating America’s affordability problems by triggering exorbitant oil prices.
These divisions matter because, in this era, CPAC is supposed to be the tip of the spear of the MAGA faithful. If some of Trump’s most fervent supporters are already incensed, then that could be a harbinger of Trump shedding more of his base in the coming weeks.
If I were an adviser briefing the president, I’d point out the air of anxiety that hung over the event this year. I’d also argue that if many of Trump’s most vocal activists are already questioning him due to this war, then it’s likely many more will do so if he puts troops on the ground. Energy markets could grow more unstable, U.S. casualties could surge and Trump might lock himself into an even longer conflict. It’s hard to see how anything would get better on a political level through escalation.
All for a war that the president — and a good chunk of the American public — knows never should’ve started.
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