MAGA voter fumes as Trump mixes 'donor-beholden hawk' with 'sheer incompetence'

Like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and now-Vice President JD Vance, journalist Sohrab Ahmari went from being an outspoken Donald Trump critic to being an ardent supporter. The Tehran, Iran-born Ahmari, now 41, once identified with neocons, but during Trump's first presidency, he went hardcore MAGA and took an America First turn. And by 2019, Ahmari was clashing with Never Trump conservatives like New York Times columnist David French — who, as he saw it, didn't have what it took to fight back against the progressive agenda.

Ahmari was an early supporter of Trump's 2024 campaign. But in an article published by UnHerd on March 19, Ahmari lays out some reasons why he has turned against him. At the top of the list is Trump's decision to go to war with Iran.

"In 2022," Ahmari recalls, "I published an essay endorsing Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination. The essay raised not a few media eyebrows, including at CNN. Back then, Ron DeSantis mania was in full swing among American conservatives. Endorsing Trump bucked the consensus of the right's consultant class, which sought 'Trumpism without Trump' and had settled on the Florida governor as the best vehicle for it: a populist (sort of) without Trump's baggage and antics. It was notable, too, that my co-author, Matthew Schmitz, and I weren't early MAGA diehards. Not Mike Cernovich or Jack Posobiec or the late Scott Adams, but, for lack of a better word, respectable conservatives with mainstream careers."

In that 2022 article, Ahmari and Schmitz argued, "Only Trump defied the deep state empowered by his Republican predecessors. Only Trump has broken from the disastrous foreign policy championed by the conservative movement."

But in 2026, Ahmari writes, Trump "has abandoned the intuitions and commitments that seemed to set him apart from the post-Nixon Republican mainstream, not least an aversion to wanton bloodshed and destruction."

"Well, here we are: Trump has now launched a broadly unpopular invasion of Iran in conjunction with Israel," Ahmari laments. "And this, in pursuit of vague objectives that shift depending on which Cabinet member you ask and when. The result: an open-ended regional war that has decimated America's military…. triggered the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and sent gas prices spiking back home — the sharpest four-week rise since Hurricane Katrina. An expeditionary force of 2500 Marines is on its way to the Gulf as I write. What Trump reportedly envisioned as a quickie, Venezuela-style affair will thus widen into a prolonged operation with a ground component."

The MAGA journalist continues, "I can't claim to speak for my co-author, but this was exactly the type of scenario I had in mind when, back in 2022, I celebrated Trump for ditching the foreign-policy consensus of conventional conservatism. And lest the hawks and pro-Israel hardliners who now lord it over MAGA attempt gaslighting, the Trump campaign in 2024 listed the plank 'PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE' near the top of its platform…. As president, DeSantis would have been an old-school, donor-beholden hawk. But we are getting the same thing with the second Trump Administration, only with the chaos, messaging confusion, and sheer incompetence characteristic of the multiply-bankrupt ex-developer and reality-TV shouter."