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Why Birthright Citizenship Is Central To American Democracy -- And Our Future

Why Birthright Citizenship Is Central To American Democracy -- And Our Future

Now that we've completed our celebration of America's 250th birthday, it's time to prepare for the 300th — the tricentennial. I will not live to see it, but I hope the nation will.

At least, I hope a certain kind of America will celebrate its 300th year — one that has regained its moral equilibrium and turned its back resoundingly on illiberalism in all its ugly forms. If the United States does not reverse its current retreat from the principles and traditions that ennobled it, if it becomes the kind of predatory, grubby and aggressive nation that Donald Trump champions, or if it becomes the socialist shambles that a growing number on the left envision, then it will not deserve to celebrate a tricentennial.

How do we find our footing in the face of these challenges to liberalism? Well, the Supreme Court just helped us. Though the court has done its share to deform our constitutional structure recently, it also gave us a gift for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration. That gift was the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara.

Yes, it would have been more bracing if the court's decision had been 9-0. But on the key concepts, the majority affirmed a principle that is foundational to our republic: equality. And by affirming that citizenship belongs to (nearly) every child born on American soil, the court also tipped the scales on another argument currently roiling our republic, namely whether we are a creedal nation or one of blood and soil.

That's not how this works. Once the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of a matter, that's the final word. It takes it out of the hands of the elected legislatures. Remember all the hullabaloo about Roe v. Wade? You can look it up. The court could change its mind in future years (as it did in the Dobbs decision), or Congress and the states could amend the Constitution. But ordinary legislation? No.

By reaffirming birthright citizenship, the court upheld a pillar of equality in America. We are not guaranteed equality of outcomes, but we are all equal citizens. That is part of what the Revolutionary War achieved. It overturned centuries of deference, subordination and caste to create a new republic based on equality. While it's true that only land-owning white males were initially counted for voting, the ideas the revolution spawned made the extension of rights almost inevitable.

As the late historian Gordon Wood put it, "Equality was in fact the most radical and most powerful ideological force let loose in the Revolution. ... Once invoked, the idea of equality could not be stopped, and it tore through American society and culture with awesome power. It became what Herman Melville called 'the great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy!'"

Before the revolution, students were instructed in how to bow to upperclassmen and professors, church pews were assigned "on the basis of family heads' age and social position," and land was inherited by primogeniture. Post-revolution, all of that changed. Handshaking, between men on equal footing, replaced bowing. Cap-doffing went out of fashion, and many other signifiers of rank and position were eliminated. The Constitution decreed that, "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States," nor by any state.

Birthright citizenship is a constitutive part of this democratic philosophy.

Think about what the United States without birthright citizenship would look like. What is the bedrock upon which our citizenship would rest? Would it be race, religion, ethnic background, family history, wealth or some other criterion? JD Vance is already flirting with hierarchies of Americanness. He has referred often to the seven generations of his ancestors who are buried in Kentucky. "Now that's not just an idea, my friends," he insists, "that is a homeland."

Vance adds that he looks forward to resting there himself when his time comes, as will his children. But his children are the product of a marriage between himself and the daughter of recent immigrants. Her ancestors are buried in India. Is that their "homeland"? Are his children less American than he?

Abraham Lincoln would like a word. In a July 10, 1858 speech, he said:

"We have besides these men — descended by blood from our ancestors — among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe — German, Irish, French and Scandinavian — men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,' and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are (my emphasis). That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world."

The Stephen Millers and Tucker Carlsons of the world are not Lincolnites. They emphatically endorse exclusive citizenship. Last year, Carlson hosted a Blaze Media figure who touted the superiority of "Heritage Americans," i.e., those who can trace their ancestry back to the Civil War. America, the guest claimed, is not "a collection of abstract things agreed to in some social contract" but a particular ethnocultural group that possesses the "Anglo-Protestant spirit" and "a tie to history and to the land. If you change the people, you change the culture." Carlson agreed.

If we were to confine citizenship to those who can trace their ancestry back to the Civil War, we would disenfranchise tens of millions, including the families of Antonin Scalia, Frank Sinatra, Jonas Salk, Barack Obama and, yes, Donald Trump, not to mention Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Steve Jobs, Andrew Grove and so many others.

As Justice Horace Gray put it in the majority decision in Wong Kim Ark: "To hold that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution excludes from citizenship the children, born in the United States, of citizens or subjects of other countries would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, or other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States."

Does this spirit require that we open our borders to all comers? Obviously not. Does it mean we must tolerate "birth tourism"? That point — raised in oral argument by the government's lawyer, D. John Sauer — is less than compelling. Sauer claimed that birthright citizenship "has spawned a sprawling industry of birth tourism as uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States in recent decades, creating a whole generation of American citizens abroad with no meaningful ties to the United States." But when pressed by Roberts about how big a problem this is, Sauer admitted that "no one knows for sure." OK, then.

Do immigrants know that once they have a child in the United States, that child is a U.S. citizen? Of course. But has this given rise to a flood of pregnant women at ports of entry? No. The Niskanen Institute examined the Center for Immigration Studies' widely cited estimate of 33,000 births to tourists per year and found it completely wrong. The CIS, to its credit, issued a retraction. Niskanen estimates that the true number may be closer to zero. But even the inflated CIS estimates would yield less than 1% of births, and there are border controls and other methods short of changing the Constitution (or other proposals peddled by MAGA influencers) that can reduce that number.

There is nothing novel about xenophobia in America, but it has always been outweighed by our dedication to the idea of America as a "shining city on a hill." That gets expressed in both our openness to immigrants and our unstinting grant of citizenship to those born here. The xenophobes object that birthright citizenship is rare in the world, which is true, though it's not true that we are alone in this policy. Several Latin American countries also grant birthright citizenship.

But that rare openness to newcomers is one reason why America has been so much more successful in assimilating immigrants than other nations. As Ronald Reagan said in 1989: "We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our ... strength from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation."

From the very beginning, we were a multiethnic, multireligious society, bound by place, yes, but much more by commitment to liberty and democracy — to the words and ideals spelled out in the Declaration and the Constitution. Even in the earliest days of the republic, America was composed of the descendants of English, French, German, Scandinavian, African, Dutch, Scottish, Irish, Swedish, Finnish, Jewish, Swiss and Native Americans. At the time of the revolution, there were whole swaths of Pennsylvania in which only German was spoken. (Frankly, Benjamin Franklin was quite ungracious about it, though he later softened.)

Uniting disparate people into a cohesive whole is not natural. Look around the globe. Ethnic, racial and religious conflict is the way of the world. Our ability to transcend those differences is one of the triumphs of our republic. As we look ahead to that celebration 50 years from now, let us hope that Trump v. Barbara restores essential ballast to the hull of our storm-tossed ship of state.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her new book, Hard Right: The GOP's Drift Toward Extremism, is available now.

Reprinted with permission from Creators



Despite the claims of anti-immigrant fanatics, the legal basis of birthright citizenship has hardly been contested in American history. As Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion noted, the practice was embedded in common law and then codified in the 14th Amendment. Neither politicians nor legal scholars thought the amendment's phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was ambiguous. It excluded only the children of diplomats, children born to invading soldiers (thankfully not a big problem), and certain native tribes. The court affirmed that interpretation in its 1898 Wong Kim Ark decision.

Five of the six justices who voted to strike down Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship last week did so on constitutional grounds. Yet we live in an age of optional realities, so the president, perhaps not understanding how the Constitution works, posted that Republicans could "easily" reverse the Supreme Court's decision "through Legislation. ... No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!" Speaker Mike Johnson, who may understand how the Constitution works but is required by his Trump servitude to pretend otherwise, said that he was very disappointed in the ruling and that "we'll have to deal with it as Congress."

How Liberals and Progressives Should Celebrate America’s 250th

How Liberals and Progressives Should Celebrate America’s 250th

This is the worst year—and a perfect time—to commemorate the American Revolution. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is arriving at a political moment wholly inconsistent with the Declaration itself. Our own leader is a would-be king, responsible for “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object,” namely his own power and glory, which he confuses with the nation’s. “Neo-royalist” is an apt term for his conduct of the presidency and his posture toward the world.

Donald Trump has so thoroughly appropriated and degraded the celebration of the 250th that liberals and progressives may want to have nothing to do with it. But that’s a mistake. Precisely because America has strayed so far from its founding heritage, this is a perfect time to celebrate, reflect on our revolutionary beginning, and recognize what the Revolution achieved and what it didn’t.

The idea that the American Revolution wasn’t all that revolutionary has long had its advocates on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Some conservatives have argued that the Revolution aimed only to restore traditional British liberties, while some on the left have claimed that it only changed the form of government but left slavery undisturbed and even reinforced social inequalities.

Neither of those views gives the Revolution its due. Although it fell short of abolishing slavery, the Revolution did far more to advance freedom and equality than just restoring traditional liberties. It set in motion radical changes in both social life and government. This is the revolutionary heritage we should be celebrating.

The American colonies were societies of inherited rank, where a wide gulf separated the rich and well-born from commoners, and where colonists with connections to the Crown—future Loyalists—enjoyed patronage and privileges. Birth order remained a critical source of inequality: In much of colonial America, as in Britain, the eldest son in a wealthy family inherited the estate under rules of primogeniture and entail. That system of inheritance in Britain had for centuries locked up landed wealth and power in a small aristocracy.

Cherished stories about the Puritans and other early settlers have misled us about the social status of most of those who crossed the Atlantic to the colonies. Data on colonial migrants on British ships show that the great majority came in an unfree condition. Most of the unfree were enslaved Africans, but more than half the whites arriving in the colonies south of New England came as indentured servants or convicts.

Like the enslaved, they were bound to forced labor, subject to harsh control by their masters, and liable to be bought and sold. Unlike the enslaved, they were bound for a fixed period, generally five to seven years for indentured servants. At any one moment, according to the late historian Gordon Wood, about half the colonial population was legally unfree.

Revolutionary America began overturning these bases of social subordination. As Wood writes in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, “By the time the Revolution had run its course in the early nineteenth century, American society had been radically and thoroughly transformed.”

Amid all the contentious arguments about the Revolution’s impact, certain facts are beyond dispute. The reason the United States became divided between free and slave states is that the states in the North began abolishing slavery in the Revolutionary era, and Congress in 1787 prohibited slavery in the western territories north of the Ohio River. The Constitution barred titles of nobility, and the states in the following years did away with primogeniture and indentured servitude.

Instead of a society stratified by inherited rank, the America that emerged from the Revolution outside the South was unusually fluid and open to mobility. Ordinary white men had less reason to feel resigned to a status assigned them at birth. After visiting America in 1831-1832, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville reported that the equality of condition had unleashed a surge of energy, ambition, and frenetic activity in nearly every sphere, politics and civic associations as well as the economy.

Washington Irving’s 1819 short story “Rip Van Winkle” describes that postrevolutionary transformation. After falling into a deep sleep before the Revolution, Rip awakens 20 years later, enters his old village during an election, and discovers a changed world: “The very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility.”

Under modern definitions, the early American republic would not qualify as a democracy because the majority of adults still had no right to vote, but the Revolution immediately created a more popular politics. One sign was a more plainspoken, easily grasped political language. Tom Paine’s Common Sense, the February 1776 pamphlet that set the colonies on the path to independence, also set the new standard for popular persuasion, appealing to what in the 18th century was just beginning to be called “public opinion.”

The new government fostered the expansion of the press and the public through the post office. Britain taxed newspapers to make them more expensive and prevent the rise of a dangerous popular press. Congress, however, starting in 1792, subsidized the distribution of newspapers with cheap postal rates and a right for printers to exchange copies free of postal charges. That was the basis for something extraordinary for its time, indeed any time: a government-subsidized but uncensored national news network. Unlike European countries, the United States also extended post roads and post offices to small towns and villages. Many people adopted a new habit, keeping up with the news.

By changing the system of government, the American Revolution had created a new political society. Strikingly, neither the growth of the press nor the energized public life and popular politics developed at that time in Canada, the part of British North America that hadn’t joined the Revolution and instead welcomed the fleeing Loyalists. When Britain’s Parliament granted Canada independence in 1867, it described the federation’s purpose as “Peace, Order, and good Government.”

The American Declaration of Independence had spelled out a different moral theory of government: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” to secure men’s “unalienable Rights,” among them “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those electrifying words, written under the immediate pressure to inspire men to risk their lives in war, did two things in the long run. They established founding principles, a founding promise. And they left America with a founding contradiction because the American republic in practice originally denied those rights to Black and indigenous people, women, and even white men without property.

Still, no matter the intent of the Declaration’s signers, their words defined the American project as many in later generations would come to understand it: fulfilling the promise and overcoming the contradiction. At Gettysburg, Lincoln said America was “dedicated” to a “proposition,” the proposition that “all men are created equal,” and that it was “for us the living … to be dedicated here to the unfinished work,” the work required for a “new birth of freedom.”

That conception of America and the continued meaning of the Declaration is not, however, universally held. Last July, JD Vance declared, “This country is not a contradiction … not some unfinished or contradictory project.” He was criticizing a post the previous day, July 4, by Zohran Mamdani, who had said: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished,” words that, in the vice president’s view, showed Mamdani’s lack of gratitude to earlier generations who had “turned [America’s] wilderness into the most powerful nation in the world.”

Vance was defending a different proposition from the one that Lincoln spoke about at Gettysburg. It’s the proposition that those who count America as their ancestral homeland going back to our early history—“heritage Americans,” some call them—have a singular “claim” to the nation: “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”

Of course, neither Mamdani nor liberals who define the core of American identity by its founding ideals say that people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War “don’t belong.” What they say is that America still has work to do to make good on its founding promise.

Donald Trump’s monarchical presidency has made that work more urgent. Unlike originalists in the law, Trump’s governing philosophy might be described as “pre-originalist”: a return to rule by proclamation and prerogative, the very thing America’s founders abhorred and tried to prevent through constitutional restraints. This year’s anniversary ought to reawaken that foundational opposition to arbitrary, personal rule, slumbering in the hearts of the president’s supporters.

The world will surely “little note, nor long remember” what any of us say at the celebrations this July. But it will again be true that it is for “us the living” to do the unfinished work that freedom perennially requires. All those who take up that challenge can count themselves heritage Americans and celebrate the 250th in a spirit faithful to the Declaration.

Paul Starr is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Bancroft Prize in American history.

Reprinted with permission from The American Prospect.







As Trump's Iran Defeat Emerges, Military And Political Analysts Condemn 'Disaster'

As Trump's Iran Defeat Emerges, Military And Political Analysts Condemn 'Disaster'

Donald Trump claimed an Iran deal was coming—for literally the 40th time—on the weekend of his 80th birthday as he turned the White House lawn into a circus of rage and vulgarity all backed with ads for crypto companies and Trump coins.

He hoped the UFC fights would overshadow how bad the so-called deal was, as he was heading to Europe to claim a victory over Iran while not having an actual copy of anything with details of it. He would just tell the G7 leaders at the summit how great it is—as if they’re going to believe him after all he’s put them through from tariffs to Greenland—while the written details conveniently wouldn’t be ready until the end of the week.

But those details of the “memorandum of understanding” (hardly a deal) have been coming out, and it’s pretty simple: Trump settled for getting the Strait of Hormuz possibly opened in return for Iran getting 300 billion dollars. On my SiriusXM program, retired U.S. Army General Randy Manner told me this was an “unconditional surrender” and will go down in history as a terrible military defeat.Trump tried to kick the details down the road, hoping against all hope that people will forget. There’s nothing concrete being stated about the nuclear material being secured and Trump is already preparing for that, actually pondering at the G7 summit, “Why even bother” to get it? His reasoning is that his bombing of the nuclear facility last year has so buried the material that it’s not usable.

Then why did we need to go to war and cost lives?

Trump says the strait will be “permanently toll-free,” but Iran says it will have “fees.”

There is a technical, legal difference, which Trump is trying to hide behind, but there’s no tangible difference between the two. Iran’s foreign ministry said that Iran was “not seeking to levy transit tolls; however, fees will be charged in exchange for the services that are provided.”

In other words, Trump is getting snookered.Trump and Vice President JD Vance have also been adamant that the $300 billion to rebuild Iran is not coming from U.S. dollars but from a fund set up by the Gulf states—the very nations Iran attacked throughout the war.

But, as retired general Jack Keane said on Fox, “The $300 billion is real. Who cares where it comes from? The Iranians are still in charge. They’re going to take that money and recover everything.”

Keane compared it to allowing Nazi Germany access to billions for reconstruction while the Nazis were still in charge, no matter who’s giving them the money.And with the Gulf states themselves looking for bailouts from the US for the damage they incurred—and the Trump administration indicated back in April that it was open to it—it’s not clear to me that US dollars are not going to Iran.

It’s also been reported, however, that the money won’t come from governments of the Gulf states but from “investors,” and not just from the Gulf.

Reuters reports:

“The new fund is a private investment vehicle, not a reconstruction or reparations program and will not include any ⁠government money or grants, the source said, adding that companies based in the U.S., the Gulf Arab states, Asia, South America and Africa have agreed to commit financing.” Investments pledged span energy, logistics, manufacturing and transport, the source said.

Iran is declaring full victory. And though it has suffered terrible losses of its military infrastructure and leadership, it has won in terms of the geopolitics of this war, simply by surviving and now having a huge weapon. It controls the strait and can get ransom for it. Iran is blaring on state media that it is victorious. Acknowledging Iran’s loses, the Financial Times puts it in context:

Within the highest ranks of the Islamic republic, nobody would deny Iran is nursing devastating losses. US and Israeli strikes destroyed crucial infrastructure, took the lives of about 3,500 civilians, and killed supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several senior military commanders.
But regime insiders, Iranian analysts and western diplomats in Tehran agree on one thing: the war failed to bring the radical transformation sought by Iran’s enemies. In fact, the regime, which at the start of the year appeared to be at its most vulnerable, seems more confident than before the war began in February.
“The US made a big mistake. It awakened the sleeping dragon,” said a regime insider. “We paid a huge price, but we activated capacities that we had previously hesitated to use.”

The extremist religious leaders in Tehran are feeling omnipotent, and they will repress the Iranian people even further. Prominent Republicans are already speaking out, and more will follow once the details are public.

Marc Thiessen, the odious former George W. Bush aide who reportedly advised Trump, warned on Fox News that this deal was “no better” than Obama’s.

After Vance confirmed the $300 billion payout, Thiessen called the deal a “disaster.”

The far-right Wall Street Journal editorial page states, “There’s no denying that Mr. Trump is retreating from his main goals as political pressure has built at home, and finishing the job requires greater military risk.”

“The deal also includes no Iranian commitments on its missiles and terror proxies,” the Journal stated. “These will be put off to ‘regional discussions’ from which no one expects much.”

In other words, Trump caused thousands of deaths, including those of American service members; cost U.S. taxpayers billions; depleted munitions; and sent gas prices soaring, which in turn had inflation on all other goods surging. And in the end he completely caved to the Iranian regime.

Reprinted with permission from The Signorile Report

'JD's Deal': Right-Wing Media Hawks Scapegoat Vance For Iran Crashout

'JD's Deal': Right-Wing Media Hawks Scapegoat Vance For Iran Crashout

The right-wing media’s hawks recognize the reported memorandum of understanding that President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance signed with Iran on Sunday is a dog’s breakfast that fails to achieve the administration’s stated war goals and leaves the U.S. in a weaker geostrategic position than before it began. But they also understand that the cult-like structure of the MAGA movement means that criticizing Trump directly could trigger an audience revolt, and that Trump himself is unlikely to change course if he feels personally impugned.

The result is a truly pathetic effort to blame the MOU’s contents on Vance — who reportedly supported the agreement and is making the interview rounds defending it while Trump is in Europe — while absolving Trump of responsibility for the document that he signed and publicly describes as “a very strong deal.”

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade exemplifies this approach. A longtime supporter of military strikes on Iran, Kilmeade supported Trump launching the war in February. Over the past months, he has repeatedly urged the president to undertake risky escalations to “finish the job.”

He also laid down a marker by asserting that “we can't leave this conflict with the uranium in the ground and the strait in Iran's hands.” This reported agreement plainly does not meet that standard, and unlike his primetime colleagues Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity, who are lavishing Trump with praise for the MOU, Kilmeade is responding by being forthright about his concerns.

But while Kilmeade spent much of Wednesday’s program panning the MOU’s reported contents, he repeatedly placed the blame on Vance while suggesting that Trump may have been out of the loop and deceived — and now that he’s paying attention, could ultimately decide to blow up the deal at the last moment

“All I'm going to say, the vice president was here and did a wonderful job on every outlet, including The View,” Kilmeade said near the top of the show. “But this is his deal. It's not the president's deal. And it's his deal and Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner together. I just hope they didn't let the president down. Because the president is putting a lot of stock in them. He can't do everything himself. I just hope they didn't let him down.”

Later in the program, after enlisting Hudson Institute senior fellow Rebeccah Heinrichs to help criticize the MOU for relieving the U.S. blockade and helping to rebuild the Iranian economy while allowing Iran to implement tolls on the strait and leaving the regime in place, Kilmeade added: “Everything that you said, I think the president would say. I’m just wondering if the people that negotiated this have informed the president about what’s in the page and a half he is going to read publicly on Friday.”

He went on to say that he hoped Trump would “go in” and change the agreement to make it more favorable “in the next 24 hours.”

"It doesn't look like Iran has been brought to its knees,” Kilmeade complained in a third segment. “Iran got a lot out of it that many people weren't expecting. That's going to be the issue. And maybe the president wasn't even expecting, because he has got enough plates in the air that he can't be into every detail.”

“So, I just wonder if the vice president, who was against this by all reports, was against the conflict to begin with, maybe he wasn't the right person to bring this conflict to an end," he concluded.

In this telling, Trump — who has spent recent weeks planning a birthday bash featuring military flyovers and a UFC fight at the White House, ensuring that the bottom of the Reflecting Pool is painted “American flag blue,” and complaining about his name being removed from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts — simply lost track of the negotiations to end the war he started, is either too lazy to read the page and a half agreement or too stupid to understand its contents, and was hoodwinked by his perfidious vice president.

And this is the story he’s telling to avoid blaming the president!

Others have similarly sought to make Vance the “Iran Deal Fall Guy,” as The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone put it after speaking to Senate Republicans like Lindsey Graham, who described the vice president as “the architect of the deal.” On Tuesday, Ben Shapiro similarly characterized it as “JD’s deal.” Vance, meanwhile, is accusing right-wing media hawks who criticize the agreement, like Fox’s Marc Thiessen and Mark Levin, of believing “Iranian propaganda,” a characterization sure to widen the split.

Ultimately, the MAGA hawks are victims of their own success and their own hubris. They got the war they demanded, only for Iran’s obvious counterstroke of closing the Strait of Hormuz to prove just as damaging as national security experts had warned. Now the incompetent president they supported is careening that war towards failure, and they can’t even manage to say that publicly without further discrediting themselves and risking their position within the movement.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

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