MAGA Pundits: Trump Can Resolve Iran War Divide By Mass Deporting Muslims
Influential right-wing voices are seeking to bridge the divide in MAGA media over Donald Trump's war in Iran by urging the president to launch a new phase of mass deportations targeting American Muslims for denaturalization and removal.
Trump’s deployment of the U.S. military alongside Israeli forces in a massive series of strikes on Iranian targets is fracturing his MAGA media machine as commentators scramble to stake out opposing positions, bash those on the other side (if generally not the president himself), and seize audience share.
Fox’s Sean Hannity and Mark Levin and The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro are among the most outspoken supporters of the war, while Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Steve Bannon are some of its most vocal critics. The feud has become heated: On Tuesday, Kelly called Hannity a “supplicant to Donald Trump” (true) while Shapiro denounced Kelly as an “unbelievable coward” and Carlson as a conspiracy-obsessed antisemite (also true).
These splits in the MAGAsphere have become a frequent feature of the second Trump administration, with the coalition of right-wing extremists that supported his election fracturing over his handling of issues like the Russia-Ukraine war, tariffs, U.S. strikes on Iran, immigration enforcement and reforms, and, most of all, the Jeffrey Epstein case.
The right-wing media ecosystem is at its most politically potent when it is united, and Trump often tries to respond to these divisions by giving the feuding pundits a common enemy to attack instead. When portions of his base revolted over the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files last year, for example, he went so far as to dangle the arrest and imprisonment of former President Barack Obama over a nonsensical conspiracy theory.
Benny Johnson and Matt Walsh, both popular podcasters who are skeptical of the Iran war but support the president, are urging Trump to deploy a similar strategy now. They want the president to reunite his supporters by proposing something they can all agree with: The brutal use of state power to punish Muslim Americans, particularly those with left-wing views. Johnson and Walsh argue that such individuals must be repressed because they constitute “the enemy” and “a clear and present danger to the lives of American citizens.”
Benny Johnson: “It’s time for “mass deportations” and “mass denaturalizations” of Muslims
“Whatever you think about the Iran war, this moment should be the absolute and total initiation point for mass deportations, grand and mass deportations of every criminal alien, mass denaturalizations of everyone who gives aid and comfort to the enemy,” Johnson said on Tuesday.
“There is an enemy,” he continued. “There are ideologies that are incompatible with Western civilization. That is a matter of fact, and we should not want them inside of our lands. It doesn't mean that we need to go kill them in their lands, but we shouldn't want them in our lands.”
Johnson went on to describe Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) as “a walking billboard for what happens when you allow this to fester,” saying that her presence at the State of the Union as a Muslim immigrant from Somalia who criticizes the president was an “insult” that “should make all Americans demand mass deportations, and immediately.”
Matt Walsh: “You should be on board” with mass deportations and denaturalizations of Muslims
Walsh warned on his podcast the same day — which was titled “The Biggest Threat To Our Country Is Inside Our Border” — that “we can’t end up with a situation where we’re fighting Muslim terrorists overseas while hordes of anti-American Muslims continue to stream into the United States.”
“If you look at the history of Muslim migration to the United States and how quickly our demographics changed, you begin to realize how dire this problem is,” he explained. After highlighting the growth of the Muslim immigrant population alongside atrocities committed by individual foreign Muslims, Walsh concluded that “this is the culture that we’ve been importing.”
Walsh went on to suggest that “more likely, all of this migration is part of the larger effort to dilute the votes of American citizens by replacing us with foreigners who despise the United States,” adding, “The top priority of this administration should be to reverse this catastrophic and deliberate effort to fundamentally alter the demographics of this country.”
“This is the top national security threat we face, and it’s not even close,” Walsh said. “So even if you support the current war in Iran, you should be on board with this — every single one of these Third World foreigners is a clear and present danger to the lives of American citizens.”
Walsh went on to say that while mass deportations and denaturalizations could prove politically unpopular, ruinously expensive, or risky, such policies are no more so than the war Trump started in Iran.
Addressing Trump directly, he continued, “If we’re going to do something drastic and explosive and unpopular thousands of miles from home, why not do it here too? That’s the question that the base is asking. If we’re going to give a major prize to the donors and pundit class — people who have tried to undermine you every step of the way, people who oppose your domestic agenda, people who, many of them, want you to be impeached and in prison — if we’re going to reward them, then will we also reward your America First base?”
The pundit then laid out a series of steps to curtail legal immigration and deport immigrants, including urging the president to “strip citizenship from paper Americans who use the word ‘they’ when they describe our country.”
“Will you finish the thing you set out to achieve?” Walsh concluded. “Will you make America America great again?”
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
