8 Fault Lines That Could Spell Trouble For Trump’s Coalition

When Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, her primary task was to defend President Donald Trump’s decision to launch an unpopular war with Iran. But beyond that narrow objective, the testimony from Gabbard — an ex-Democrat whose long-standing opposition to U.S. involvement in the Middle East prompted her to back Trump in 2024 — carried a deeper significance: a test of whether Trump’s heterodox political coalition can hold together despite its deepening divides on prominent issues.

The war with Iran is stoking a fresh round of infighting within Trump’s GOP, a conflict that burst into the open on Tuesday when Joe Kent, one of Gabbard’s former top aides, abruptly resigned from his job, citing his objections to the administration’s actions in Iran. But Iran is far from the only issue dividing the Trump coalition: An x-ray of the Trump coalition reveals a multitude of hairline fractures on issues ranging from immigration to U.S.-Israel relations to fundamental questions of American identity.

With the 2026 midterms fast approaching, those divides have fueled speculation that MAGA voters might defect en masse from the GOP in November. But that’s not the primary threat facing the Trump coalition: Recent polling suggests that self-identified “MAGA Republicans” are standing firmly with Trump on the war and a host of other divisive issues, underscoring the stubborn reality that — as Trump has pithily put it — “MAGA is me.”

Yet as several conservative commentators have recently pointed out, Trump didn’t win reelection in 2024 merely on the strength of MAGA voters. His winning coalition paired his core MAGA constituency with a broader constellation of other non-traditional Republican constituencies — disillusioned Democrats and “MAHA moms” and “manosphere” podcast bros among them.

It is that broader Trumpian coalition — rather than the core base of MAGA supporters — that some Trump backers fear has been endangered by Trump’s policy choices. As the conservative activist Mike Cernovich put it this week, “A generational coalition, squandered.”

Here are the key issues that threaten to tear that coalition apart.

War with Iran

The ongoing military operations in Iran are prompting pushback from many of the usual suspects on the anti-interventionist right, led by figures like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. But the war has prompted some more eyebrow-raising defections as well: On Monday, Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia whose conviction for his role in the Jan. 6 riots was commuted by Trump, announced that he is “no longer MAGA,” citing his opposition to the war. Meanwhile, Joe Rogan, the leading voice of the Trump-friendly faction within the bro-podcast sphere, has said that Trump supporters feel “betrayed” over Iran.

Some signs of intra-GOP dissent are starting to show up in the polling as well. Though over 90 percent of self-identified “MAGA Republicans” continue to back the war, close to 25 percent of “Republicans” and nearly 40 percent of “non-MAGA Republicans” disapprove of it. The war polls even worse with independents, who disapprove by an average margin of 70 percent to 30 percent. Those voters are also more likely to cite “affordability” as a primary concern, creating a political pitfall for the administration as the war drives up gas prices and threatens to stoke inflation.

Israel and Antisemitism

The war with Iran has exacerbated another debate within Trump’s GOP — over the U.S.’s relationship with Israel and the MAGA movement’s tolerance for critiques of the Jewish state that many consider openly antisemitic.

Since the start of the war, some opponents on the right have argued that Trump was drawn into the war at the behest of Israel, tapping into the longstanding belief in some corners of the right that Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. exert malign influence over the GOP’s foreign policy. In his resignation letter from ODNI, for instance, Kent argued that the U.S. “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby” — not because it served vital American interests.

Meanwhile, some pro-Israeli conservatives have argued that these criticisms of the war are part of a broader campaign to force Jewish conservatives out of the MAGA coalition by inflaming antisemitic sentiment among the Republican base. Indeed, the debate over the war does appear to have further elevated openly antisemitic figures on the right, including the white-nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes and the anti-Israel podcaster Candace Owens; both of their podcasts have crept up the charts in recent weeks.

Immigration

The administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement came to a head in Minneapolis earlier this year, when federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens. The ensuing backlash has forced the administration to recalibrate its approach, with the White House opting for a change in leadership at the Department of Homeland Security and quietly backing away from some of its more aggressive messaging around mass deportations.

Yet the administration’s softening of its approach to its immigration agenda has not landed well with all members of the coalition, fueling a deepening fracture between immigration hawks and Trump’s political operation ahead of the midterms. Last week, a group of anti-immigration groups launched a new coalition to pressure the administration to stay the course, warning that the president risks further alienating his base if he abandons his promise to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants.

Meanwhile, the administration is under pressure from allied business leaders and Republican lawmakers who are warning that more aggressive immigration enforcement could harm key industries and turn off important swaths of voters in the fall, including Hispanic voters. Even this wing of the party is divided among itself on how to fix problem, with some arguing that the administration’s policy needs to substantively change, and others advocating for a more tailored message that focuses on criminal arrests, public safety and Trump’s success in closing the southern border.

Epstein Files

Although it’s been subsumed somewhat in the headlines by the debate around the war in Iran, the split over the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files continues to roil Trump’s coalition, fueled by lingering anger at the administration for reneging on its promise to swiftly release all government documents related to the Epstein case.

In a sign that the issue is not likely to disappear from Republicans’ radar any time soon, House Oversight Chair James Comer this week  subpoenaed Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about the files before the committee, a move that came after six Republicans joined Democrats in backing a motion to call Bondi to testify.

The Epstein scandal is also shaping up to play a major role the high-profile Republican congressional primary in Kentucky, where Rep. Thomas Massie, who has led the charge on Capitol Hill to compel the administration to release more of the files, is facing a Trump-backed primary challenger.

MAHA

The alliance between Trump’s MAGA movement and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make American Healthy Again” cohort was one of the most high-profile political unions of the 2024 cycle, culminating in RFK Jr.’s once-unlikely elevation to secretary of Health and Human Services.

But now that alliance is under serious strain thanks to recent moves by the Trump administration and even RFK Jr. himself. In February, RFK Jr. sparked a mini revolt among MAHA loyalists when he backed Trump’s directive to increase the manufacturing of a chemical herbicide that he once claimed “put Americans at risk” due to its possible carcinogenic qualities. At the same time, some of MAHA’s vaccine skeptics are growing frustrated with what they see as Kennedy’s quiet retreat from a more assertive anti-vaccine agenda.

All of this has opened a rift between Republicans and the MAHA faithful, a gap that some Democrats are trying to exploit ahead of 2026 by testing out new messaging appealing to the movement’s concerns.

Artificial Intelligence

A more under-the-radar debate is shaping up within the GOP over MAGA’s approach to artificial intelligence, as POLITICO Magazine recently reported. To date, the Trump administration has taken a relatively hands-off and industry-friendly approach to AI, signing a controversial executive order preempting state-level AI regulations and building close political connections to major AI companies.

But other Republicans are less bullish about the technology and have started publicly raising concerns about its widespread adoption. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has been aggressively pushing for limits on AI data centers, arguing that AI could massively disrupt the labor market and create a “existential crisis for self-government.” On Capitol Hill, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has put forward a slew of new AI regulations, which he has argued are necessary to curb the threat that “transhumanism” poses to American families and the Christian faith.

Although the debate around AI hasn’t gained as much traction in the 2026 midterms, some GOP operatives expect that it could become a major issue in the 2028 Republican primary — especially if Vice President JD Vance, a primary messenger of the administration’s pro-AI agenda, holds onto his role as frontrunner.

Gender Politics and Sexism

After 2016, a sizable cohort of young, college-educated women embraced MAGA and “the New Right” as a respite from what they saw as the stifling orthodoxy of liberal feminism. But as New York Magazine recently reported, a growing number of these women are now turning their back on the movement, repelled by what they see as the increasingly undisguised sexism that has emerged from the union of MAGA’s socially conservative traditionalists on the one hand and its reactionary male chauvinists on the other.

If that discontent continues to spread, it could create a significant electoral problem for Trump, whose approval ratings are already underwater with female voters. Further erosions in that support could risk enflaming other latent tensions between Trump and his socially conservative supporters, especially if he further moderates his position on abortion rights and access to IVF in a bid to shore up support among women.

American Identity

Underlying many of these fault lines within the right is a more basic philosophical debate: What is the basis of American identity, and who counts as a “true” American?

Some on the right, like Fuentes and his “Groyper” followers, have embraced an explicitly racialist definition of Americanness rooted in white, Christian identity. Others on the right have embraced the fuzzier notion of “heritage America,” the idea that American identity is rooted in the predominantly Anglo-Protestant culture of America’s original 13 colonies, and therefore that “Heritage Americans” — or people who can trace their lineage to that cohort — have a privileged claim to American identity. The concept lends itself to a hardline position on immigration restriction and has been winked at by immigration hawks within the administration: Vance, though stopping short of embracing the term outright, has echoed some of its core tenets, including the rejection of a “credal” definition of America as a nation grounded in shared principles.

That idea has met resistance among some conservatives, though, who are moving to reassert America’s credal foundations. Writing in The New York Times in December, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, now running for governor in Ohio, critiqued the rising tide of “blood and soil” nationalism on the right, comparing it to the Democratic Party’s embrace of “woke excess” in the run-up to the 2024 election. “If the post-Trump GOP makes the same mistake with our own identitarian fringe,” he wrote, “we will meet a similar fate.”

Myah Ward and Liz Crampton contributed to this report.