President Donald Trump is facing one of the biggest political tests of his career as he struggles to keep his MAGA coalition together, according to a journalist who recently interviewed him.
Cracks began to appear over the past couple of weeks about getting the U.S. pulled into Israel's escalating conflict with Iran, which some Trump allies call a violation of his "America First" promise. But Trump bristled when asked about that by The Atlantic's Michael Scherer.
“Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that,” Trump told him. “For those people who say they want peace — you can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon. So for all of those wonderful people who don’t want to do anything about Iran having a nuclear weapon — that’s not peace.”
Scherer appeared Tuesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" to discuss the interview and the latest developments in Trump's effort to keep his base united.
"You know, the measure of a politician is how well he can get contradictory parts of a coalition together to believe in him," Scherer said, "and the challenge of governing is, when you start governing, you have to make choices, and this is clearly a key moment for his coalition, and I think it has bothered him. I mean, he's spoken out to me on Saturday, he was speaking about a couple of times yesterday in Canada. He's tweeted about Tucker Carlson recently. I think he feels very strongly and he's been consistent for weeks now that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon and that the option of military force by the U.S. has to be on the table."
"There is a significant part of his base that sees in that statement a return to sort of the Bush doctrine of the early 2000s," Scherer added. "I mean, that's where Tucker Carlson is coming from. He felt very burned by the invasion of Iraq, and we're going to see how that plays out over the coming days."
Trump's base has been famously loyal to the president, but Scherer said he's also faced down critics from inside the Republican Party since entering politics. He said Carlson's challenge stood out as notable.
Carlson, the ex-Fox News host, suggested on Monday that if Trump gets involved in Iran it could be the end of his presidency. Other outspoken right-wingers, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), have said that involvement in foreign wars runs contrary to the America First agenda.
"What is different is Tucker Carlson is actually basically an intimate of President Trump, and after the election last year, Tucker was down at Mar-a-Lago for weeks," Scherer said. "He's very close to the president's son, he's very close to Robert F. Kennedy, he was part of conversations about the formation of the government. If you go back to his time at Fox and after he left Fox he was the most Trumpist of the people there, but, again, the Trump message has always included more more people than any one policy can contain, if you look at tariffs and lowering taxes or anything along those lines."
"So this is a breaking point," Scherer added. "I mean, Tucker was on different web show yesterday saying that if Trump goes through with this, this could be the end of his presidency. So the stakes are pretty high, and these are very strong words being exchanged between the two men."
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