Trump decision for US to strike Iran splits Maga supporters – US politics live

2 months ago 41

Trump’s military attack on Iran reveals split among Maga diehards

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I am Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.

We start with news that Saturday’s US strikes on Iran provoked conflicting reactions from isolationist Republicans who support Donald Trump’s “Make America great again” (Maga) movement, catching them – like many Democrats – between supporting efforts against nuclear proliferation and opposing American intervention in foreign conflicts.

The far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – a loyalist to the president – reacted to the strikes by urging those in the US to pray that terrorists do not attack “our homeland” in retaliation.

“Let us join together and pray for the safety of our US troops and Americans in the Middle East,” Greene wrote on X.

But Greene had not been so supportive in a message posted 30 minutes before Trump announced news of the surprise strikes on Saturday evening.

In that message, Greene wrote: “Every time America is on the verge of greatness, we get involved in another foreign war. There would not be bombs falling on the people of Israel if [its prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu had not dropped bombs on the people of Iran first. Israel is a nuclear armed nation. This is not our fight. Peace is the answer.”

The former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, who has been an opponent of US military intervention in Iran, hit out at the president for thanking Netanyahu in a national address shortly after the strikes.

Speaking on his War Room web show, Bannon said, “It hasn’t been lost … that he thanked Bibi Netanyahu, who I would think right now – at least the War Room’s position is – [is] the last guy on Earth you should thank.”

Read the full report here:

In other developments:

JD Vance has said the US is “not at war” with Iran – but is with its nuclear weapons program, holding out a position that the White House hopes to maintain over the coming days as the Iranian regime considers a retributive response to Saturday’s US strike on three of its nuclear installations.
A Tennessee judge on Sunday ordered the release of Kilmar Ábrego García, whose mistaken deportation has become a flashpoint in Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, while he awaits a federal trial on human smuggling charges. But he is not expected to be allowed to go free.
Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian rights activist, freed from Ice detention on Friday, returned to Columbia University on Sunday to renew his commitment to the cause of Palestinian freedom and opposition to both the university and the Trump administration.
‘Ticking timebomb’: Ice detainee dies in transit as experts say more deaths likely.
Republican representative’s ectopic pregnancy clashes with Florida abortion law.
Gun-wielding attacker killed at church in suburban Detroit.

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Ramon Antonio Vargas

The Ohio high school graduate and soccer standout who was recently deported from the US to Honduras despite having no arrest record has described being “handcuffed like we’re some big criminals” for the entirety of his deportation flight.

“To me, it was kind of more traumatizing because I haven’t been to my birth country in years,” Emerson Colindres, 19, who was brought from Honduras to the US by his family at age eight, said to the Cincinnati news station WCPO in an interview over the weekend.

He also told the outlet that his pre-deportation detention before leaving the US was “mentally draining”, mainly because he spent all but two hours daily sitting in a jail cell “doing nothing”.

Colindres’s remarks to WCPO were some of his first about an experience vividly contradicting claims that the immigration crackdown spearheaded by Donald Trump since he began his second presidency in January has prioritized targeting dangerous criminals.

He was a star soccer player at Gilbert A Dater high school, had no criminal record, and was attending a regularly scheduled appointment with Immigration and Customers Enforcement (Ice) in Cincinnati when he was detained on 4 June. It was mere days after his graduation from Dater.

Teachers and soccer teammates from Dater joined protests that gathered at the local jail where he was held until his transfer to an Ice facility in Louisiana. Then, on 18 June, the Trump administration deported Colindres to a country where he had not lived for about 11 years.

Speaking to WCPO from Honduras on a video phone call on Saturday, Colindres said he was relieved to no longer be jailed. “You were in there 22 hours in the cell doing nothing,” Colindres said of his confinement. “That’s crazy – like, that’s all … mentally draining.”

He argued that “a lot of people” on his ensuing deportation flights had no arrest records in the US, “like myself included”.

Nonetheless, “the whole flight I was handcuffed like we’re some big criminals,” Colindres added.

Pakistan condemned US president Donald Trump for bombing Iran, less than 24 hours after saying he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for defusing a recent crisis with India.

Relations between the two South Asian countries plummeted after a massacre of tourists in Indian-controlled Kashmir in April, AP reports.

The nuclear-armed rivals stepped closer to war in the weeks that followed, attacking each other until intense diplomatic efforts, led by the US, resulted in a truce for which Trump took credit.

It was this “decisive diplomatic intervention and pivotal leadership” that Pakistan praised in an effusive message Saturday night on the X platform when it announced its formal recommendation for him to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Less than 24 hours later, however, it condemned the US for attacking Iran, saying the strikes “constituted a serious violation of international law” and the statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Edward Helmore

JD Vance has said the US is “not at war” with Iran – but is with its nuclear weapons program, holding out a position that the White House hopes to maintain over the coming days as the Iranian regime considers a retributive response to Saturday’s US strike on three of its nuclear installations.

In an interview Sunday with NBC News’ Meet the Press, the US vice-president was asked if the US was now at war with Iran.

“We’re not at war with Iran,” Vance replied. “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.”

But Vance declined to confirm with absolute certainty that Iran’s nuclear sites were completely destroyed, a position that Donald Trump set out in a Saturday night address when the president stated that the targeted Iranian facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated” in the US strikes.

Vance instead said that he believes the US has “substantially delayed” Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon.

“I’m not going to get into sensitive intelligence about what we’ve seen on the ground there in Iran, but we’ve seen a lot, and I feel very confident that we’ve substantially delayed their development of a nuclear weapon, and that was the goal of this attack,” Vance said.

He continued: “Severely damaged versus obliterated – I’m not exactly sure what the difference is.

President Donald Trump has called into question the future of Iran’s ruling theocracy, seemingly contradicting his administration’s earlier calls to resume negotiations and avoid an escalation in fighting.

“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???” Trump posted on social media. “MIGA!!!”

The posting on Truth Social marked something of a reversal from defence secretary Pete Hegseth’s Sunday morning news conference that detailed the aerial bombing on three of the country’s nuclear sites.