From a major Trump supporter. Is Trumpism crashing on the shoals of the Iran war? That is what Christopher Caldwell thinks. Caldwell is on the right. He’s a contributing editor at Claremont Review of Books. Caldwell has been trying to define and, even, craft a coherent Trumpism. But in a recent piece in The Spectator titled “The End of Trumpism,” he seems pretty dispirited. He writes: “The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project.” It wasn’t just Iran that led Caldwell to that point. It was also Trump’s brazen self-dealing, the waves of influence peddling, the sense that this man who was supposed to represent the will of the people in some way was doing something very different. The real question is: How big is MAGA? If you look at polls that measure it, or the people who have been asking that question for quite a while, like NBC has, it kind of peaked after the election at around 36 percent. So I think that gives him a lot less leeway to, let’s just say, feel that his base will follow him anywhere. Here you have a billionaire whose major, signature legislative achievements are very unpopular tax cuts that redistributed money upward; who was elected with the help of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk; who seems to be, you note this in your piece, enriching himself, rapidly, to the tune of billions of dollars, since being in office — and who also seems to exist to many as a response to efforts at equality. I think that the promise of no wars was a kind of ruling out. And Trump has a particular need to make this a campaign promise. There are certain things that you have to commit to not doing. So I think that people thought: Yes, he’s going to do a lot of crazy stuff — I think people know him — but he’s not going to do that. He’s not going to bring the country into a war lasting years. There are limits somewhere. But once he does that, once he turns around and does that, your sense of the limits is gone. Then suddenly, being a Trump supporter is a whole different proposition. I don’t think people are willing to pay a cost for Trump’s impulse here. And to have him create a surge of inflation and scarcity, I’m not sure is survivable for a war that very, very few people were asking for. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-christopher-caldwell.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
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