MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace says MAGA got a 'generational stabbing in the back' from Trump

President Donald Trump's bombing of Iran was one of the biggest betrayals of his own voting base yet, MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace said on Monday — and she compared Trump's past words to his actions now in a devastating sequence of clips.

"Our current strategy of nation-building and regime change is a proven absolute failure," said Trump in one clip. "We have created the vacuums that allow terrorism to grow and thrive. These globalists want to squander all of America's strength, blood, and treasure chasing phantoms overseas while keeping us distracted from the havoc they're creating right here at home."

"That was then," said Wallace. "This afternoon, with all the force of a rock-splitting crack of lightning, Donald Trump's rank betrayal of more than a decade of foreign policy promises is leaving a first-of-its-kind fissure inside the MAGA movement. Not that his supporters are strangers to betrayal by any means. He's broken his word with them and to them before, and he'll undoubtedly do it again. But the military action Donald Trump took in the early hours Saturday morning in Iran, the war he started, is a sort of reversal, fundamentally different on an atomic level than anything we've seen him do since he's been in our politics over the last 10 years."

"The best way to fully understand the depth and scope of that betrayal today might be to hold our noses and submerge ourselves in the now-broken promises of Donald Trump's 'no new wars' mantra," said Wallace. "It starts with his 2016 campaign for president."

She then played another clip.

"You can't fight two wars at one time," said Trump in the clip. "If you listen to him and you listen to some of the folks that I've been listening to, that's why we've been in the Middle East for 15 years, and we haven't won anything. We've spent $5 trillion in the Middle East because of thinking like that. In a Trump administration, our actions in the Middle East will be tempered by realism. The current strategy of toppling regimes with no plan for what to do the day after only produces power vacuums that are filled simply by terrorists. Gradual reform, not sudden and radical change, should be our guiding objective in that region."

"You don't say?" said Wallace. But it wasn't just Trump saying these things, she noted — it's many of the people now in high-ranking positions in his administration.

"President Trump campaigned against regime change wars when he ran for president, but now he bows to the wishes of the neocons who surround him, clamoring for regime change wars that he claimed to oppose, this time in Venezuela and in Iran," said Tulsi Gabbard, now Trump's Director of National Intelligence, in a clip from her time in the Democratic 2020 primary. "These powerful politicians dishonor the sacrifices made by every one of my brothers and sisters in uniform."

"Sometimes we're going to have overlapping interests, and sometimes we're going to have distinct interests," said now-Vice President JD Vance in another clip. "And our interests, I think very much, is in not going to war with Iran, right? It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country."

"Just let that sink in," said Wallace. "JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard worked for Donald Trump. Now they just work for him. They subverted everything they've ever said publicly that they believed, and they serve a commander-in-chief who made the decision to do precisely what they publicly built their political identities around and warned against. It is an epic generational stabbing in the back, not just for those officials who have been made to look like fools."

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