The Fractured Faithful

Over the weekend, Donald Trump unilaterally plunged the U.S. into war with Iran, ordering strikes on three nuclear sites inside the country. The decision has sent shockwaves through the MAGA Media ecosystem, where over the last week its top personalities have clashed over what action Trump should—or should not—take.

As hawks like Mark Levin and Sean Hannity celebrated Trump’s move as historic and heroic, the more isolationist wing of the new right-wing media ecosystem have been far more quiet.

To unpack this moment of right-wing media chaos, I spoke with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters and an expert on MAGA Media dynamics. In our conversation, Gertz explained how the movement’s loyalty to Trump helps paper over deeper ideological fractures, why Fox News still shapes Trump’s worldview, what the attack reveals about Tucker Carlson's influence, and so much more.

Below is the Q&A, slightly edited for style and clarity.

In the hours since Trump directed the U.S. military to attack Iran, what observations have you made from right-wing media? How is the MAGA Media machine covering this?

Fox’s propagandists got the war they wanted, they are very happy about it, and they are making sure the president knows they think he did the right thing. Bret Baier broke the news and he and his “news side” guests provided credulously supportive coverage with minimal consideration of potential downsides for the first hours or so. Then Fox turned things over to Sean Hannity for two hours of special coverage on a Saturday night even though—or perhaps because—he’s effectively a Trump political operative. Hannity, in turn, gave Mark Levin lots of airtime to call Trump “a historic figure” and scream at Fox’s audience that they could now “go to bed peacefully” because Trump had stopped “these Islamo-Nazis [who] were building nuclear weapons to attack us with ballistic missiles” and “protected the entire Earth from these barbarians.” Basically, it’s been what you would expect from a network whose top priority is keeping Trump happy.

Outside of Fox, MAGA hawks like Laura Loomer are showering Trump with praise and feel fully empowered to settle scores with MAGA isolationists like Tucker Carlson. And members of that cohort are in varying stages along the path of bending the knee. Charlie Kirk, for instance, has fully flipped in a matter of days from calling for negotiations to claiming Iran left Trump with no other choice and touting his decision. As of noon, Candace Owens had issued a grand total of two X posts on the strikes, neither of which was particularly critical of Trump, while Carlson had seemingly not commented at all. None of the movement's key figures seem to be treating this as a breaking point.

Do you now anticipate figures like Carlson and Owens will rally around Trump? Or do you think they'll continue to express opposition to his actions?

The incentives for every MAGA Media figure are the same, and they point toward finding a way to support whatever Trump does. I don’t expect that to change until and unless the president decides to vacate the political stage. The pundits who didn't get their way are more likely to end up in Trump’s Cabinet than they are to abandon him. They have too much on the line to do otherwise.

Were you surprised by the extent of infighting inside MAGA Media this week?

Not particularly. MAGA Media is defined by its obsequious shilling for Trump, but that cult of personality ultimately papers over real schisms. One of the major divides is between the movement’s hawks, who favor projecting U.S. military power abroad, and its isolationists, who want to withdraw from America’s international commitments and focus on crushing domestic enemies.

We actually saw similar skirmishes break out during Trump’s first term over his Iran policy, though at the time both sides were fighting on Fox’s airwaves and now Fox is basically aligned and the critics exist largely outside the network. But notably, everyone involved on both sides presented themselves as channeling the “true” America First position and presenting their opposition as betraying the spirit of Trumpism. And no one was saying they will be done with Trump if he spurns their advice.

What did you make of Carlson’s broadsides against figures like Levin and Hannity?

It was fundamentally a battle for Trump’s attention between MAGA Media figures on opposite sides of the divide. Levin reportedly met with Trump at the White House earlier this month and urged him to support an Israeli strike. That’s the sort of influence with Trump that Carlson had at the peak of his Fox power, and Carlson responded by kicking off the feud.

Carlson is correct that Levin and Hannity are “warmongers,” that Levin is “terrible on TV” and screams at the audience, and that their network is a “propaganda hose” that deceives “elderly Fox viewers.” And Levin is right that Carlson is “a reckless and deceitful propagandist” who “promote[s] antisemitism and conspiracy nuts.” Credit where due to both, but obviously neither should be advising a president of the United States about whether to launch military strikes!

Do you believe it was a genuine ideological battle, or some performative audience-grabbing antics disguised as a policy debate?

I tend to avoid trying to figure out whether right-wing media figures really believe what they say. I think the arguments they present to the world are ultimately what matter. It is definitely true, however, that differentiating from peers and starting feuds are both good ways to attract attention and harvest an audience, and that everyone involved in the inter-MAGA feud is keenly aware of what their audience wants from them. No one in the right’s fractured media ecosystem attracts ears and eyeballs by being milquetoast.

You pay close attention to Fox News. Give us a sense of what the president heard from the right-wing network.

It was a nonstop cacophony of warmongering. The network’s programming regularly presented an Iranian nuclear weapon as an imminent and catastrophic threat to the United States, and any military action to prevent it as justified, necessary and overwhelmingly likely to succeed without incident. According to The New York Times, the network’s coverage was responsible for Trump’s shift toward supporting Israel’s strikes on Iran.

That is entirely believable—Fox’s coverage had immense influence over Trump’s actions during his first term, from pandemic policy to pardons, federal contracts to administration staffing. I’ve tracked more than 1,300 instances over the years of Trump posting in real time about particular Fox segments he was watching, a phenomenon I termed the Trump-Fox feedback loop. The president has also hired at least 23 former Fox employees for his second administration, including his defense secretary and director of national intelligence.

Trump appears to have listened to Fox News, at the end of the day. What do you think that says about the power of Carlson? Is he now an emperor with no clothes, given how dismissive Trump has been of him?

I think Carlson’s influence was at its peak when Trump was out of the limelight. He was the most powerful person in right-wing media and probably a top-five figure in the GOP from the day Trump left office in 2021 until his return to the campaign trail in 2023. But Carlson was filling the vacuum Trump left behind, and his star began to dim the minute Trump relaunched his political career. Trump and his movement cannot abide the existence of independent power centers of any kind, and so Carlson isn’t one–he’s just another lackey dependent on the president’s favor.

Coming out of the 2024 election, there was a lot of chatter about how Trump leveraged new media personalities to defeat Kamala Harris. But when Trump attacked Carlson this week, he did so by also jabbing that very new media ecosystem, telling Carlson he should "get a TV network" if he wants people to listen to him. What did you make of that?

I think Trump was speaking literally—he used to regularly watch Carlson’s show and take his advice, but now he is not paying attention to what Carlson says because he isn’t on TV. Trump was happy to sit for long interviews with podcasters in order to reach their audiences during the 2024 campaign, but he gets his own news from his television. I think there’s no question that when Carlson lost Fox’s premiere primetime slot, it dramatically reduced his influence over Trump himself.

While Carlson is dependent on Trump’s base for his audience and thus will grovel as needed to hold onto his approval at all costs, I think something more interesting is happening among the podcasters who supported Trump during the 2024 election but host programs that are less explicitly political. People like Theo Von and Dave Smith were in total revolt last week over his Iran position. Smith even apologized for previously supporting Trump and called for his impeachment and removal from office. That’s an unfathomable shift for a MAGA Media pundit, and a sign of very rough political waters ahead for Trump now that he’s committed the U.S. to joining the war.

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