Tucker Carlson is going to war—against Senate Republicans.

In a post on X, Carlson denounced Sens. Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn for demanding that President Joe Biden strike Tehran itself in retaliation for the killing of three American soldiers stationed in Jordan. “Hit Iran now. Hit them hard,” said Graham. Corny demanded, “Target Tehran.” Carlson’s response  was no less pithy: “F****** lunatics.”

He wasn’t referring to the Iranian mullahs but the Republican senators.

Carlson’s ire, as Politico has noted, is consonant with a wider struggle inside the Republican party. On one side are the foreign policy hawks such as Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Tom Cotton. Cotton stated, “The only answer to these attacks must be devastating military retaliation against Iran’s terrorist forces, both in Iran and across the Middle East. Anything less will confirm Joe Biden as a coward unworthy of being commander-in-chief.”  The hawks seek to keep the Reaganite flame alive.

On the other side is the insurgent MAGA wing. It is pinning its hopes on a return to the presidency by Donald Trump. Its aim is to avoid any lurches into ideological heresy by Trump. When speculation flourished that Nikki Haley might be vying to become Trump’s vice-president, for example, Carlson sought to cut it off at the pass, observing, “I would not only not vote for that ticket, I would advocate against it as strongly as I could.”

This struggle has centered for the past several months over aid to Ukraine. Trump has vowed to stymie any deal that Senate Republicans may reach with Democrats over border security and aid to Ukraine, the very agreement that House Speaker Mike Johnson said was the prerequisite for any further assistance to Ukraine. Now Johnson, who speaks regularly with Trump, is indicating that his own original suggestion would be dead on arrival in the House. The result has been feuding among Republicans over the past several weeks.

Now, the prospect of renewed warfare in the Middle East could further fracture the GOP. Just as they believe that America should attenuate, if not sever, its ties to NATO—Trump recently declared at a rally in Las Vegas that “we don’t get so much out of it”—MAGA Republicans are hostile to enmeshing America in a fresh conflict in the Middle East. At most, they blame Biden’s putative weakness for emboldening Iran.

The truth is that Biden himself is well aware of the perils of a wider conflagration, which is why he has been urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reach a cease-fire deal with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. A wider war in the Middle would play into Trump’s hands, raising oil prices and amplifying the impression that events abroad are lurching out of control under Biden’s watch. Speaking on ABC News on Sunda, Gen. C.Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted that the administration’s aim was not to have “the conflict broaden.”

Who knew that Tucker Carlson and Biden’s new appointee to the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be on the same page?

About the Author

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel. In 2008, his book They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons was published by Doubleday. It was named one of the one hundred notable books of the year by The New York Times. He is the author of America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, coming next month.

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