As President Donald Trump considers whether to green-light airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, he is increasingly shunning the isolationist advisers he brought into his cabinet — and those who helped get him elected to a second term — in favor of a trio of hawkish voices who’ve spent years arguing for the United States to take action against Iran.
The president has publicly maintained that “nobody knows what I'm going to do” about whether American stealth bombers could be dispatched to drop a 30,000-pound bunker-buster bomb onto Iran’s Fordow enrichment facility, located deep inside a mountain near the city of Qom.
In a brief appearance in the Oval Office Wednesday afternoon, the president stressed no final decision had been made on whether to proceed.
“I have ideas on what to do but I haven’t made a final—I like to make the final decision one second before it’s due,” he said.
He also told reporters earlier in the day that “the next week is going to be very big” and warned that Iran’s regime had been “schoolyard bullies” in the region — until Israel’s campaign of airstrikes took out much of Tehran’s capabilities.
But the ‘maybe-I-will, maybe-I-won’t’ tone Trump has been projecting publicly is a stark contrast from the anti-war, negotiation-friendly position he took during his last presidential campaign, when he surrounded himself with isolationists and other heterodox figures who haven’t hewed to the traditionally hawkish strain of foreign policy orthodoxy that had long been favored in the Republican Party.
Two major figures in Trump’s cabinet who’ve made their brands on being against U.S. involvement in the Middle East — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — have found themselves sitting on the sidelines as Trump ponders authorizing action against Tehran.
According to an administration official who spoke to The Independent on condition of anonymity, the president has been seeking outside counsel from two notoriously hawkish Republican senators, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
Graham told Politico on Wednesday that he spoke with Trump when the president was at the Group of Seven summit in Canada earlier this week to encourage the president to support Israel’s push to stop Iran’s nuclear program.
“He called me right before he left ... I said, ‘Mr. President, this is a historic moment. Four presidents have promised that they won’t get a nuclear weapon. On your watch, you can fulfill that promise,” Graham said.
Another major figure in Trump’s new inner circle as he contemplates military action is the hawkish head of U.S. Central Command, General Erik Kurilla.
The career army officer, who is known as “The Gorilla,” has reportedly been granted an extreme amount of leeway by Hegseth and has seen more and more resources sent to his area of responsibility, which includes the Middle East region.
Additionally, Trump has turned to a team from within the administration consisting of Vice President JD Vance, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Dan Caine, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as the president’s acting national security adviser.
Notably, that group does not include Gabbard or Hegseth, even though the DNI and Defense Secretary would normally be part of any conversations about troop deployments and authorizing military force against a foreign enemy.
Hegseth, a former Fox News host whose tenure atop the Pentagon has seen him sack a number of top flag officers and force out several top aides during a shambolic leak investigation that has turned up no leakers, has seen his star dim in Trumpworld since it became known that he’d revealed attack plans in an unauthorized Signal group that had inadvertently included a journalist.
Gabbard, the ex-Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who was largely known for her pro-Russia political positions before she defected to Trump’s side during last year’s election, is understood to have infuriated Trump by posting a slickly-produced video to social media in which she warned that “political elite warmongers” were “carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.”
According to The Washington Post, Trump was angered by the video, which he saw as an attempt to sway him as he was considering reports indicating that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was planning to strike against Iran.
Gabbard also previously told Congress that Iran had not fully restarted the weapons program it had shelved decades ago even as it had begun enriching uranium in violation of a previous agreement struck during the Obama administration (which the U.S. withdrew from during Trump’s first term).
Asked about her testimony aboard Air Force One while returning from the G7 summit on Monday, Trump replied: “I don’t care what she said.”
Trump’s MAGA base splinters
The internal splits within Trump’s own administration echo what is happening in public as Trump moves closer to approving military action against Tehran.
Prominent conservative and MAGA influencers have been lashing out online against Trump’s plans, which violate what they say is a MAGA commitment to isolationism and keeping the U.S. out of “forever wars” in the Middle East.
One Trump ally on Capitol Hill, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, took to X earlier this week to say any person who is “slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA.”
Another former House ally, ex-Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, told The Wall Street Journal he doesn’t think Trump will push America into a long war against Iran, but he said it was a “fair question” whether “those folks who want to entangle themselves in an Iranian war” have “a plan for the day after.”
But one of Trump’s staunchest media allies, ex-White House chief strategist turned podcast host Steve Bannon, has been more supportive.
On Wednesday he called on Trump to be better at explaining his decision on Iran, “not just to MAGA, but to the American people of why we would get involved in another war over there as a combatant.”
Bannon said ultimately, Trump’s base would grudgingly rally to the president’s side once the decision is made.
“We don’t like it, maybe we hate it, but, you know, we’ll get on board,” he said.
