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Stephen Bannon sounded uncertain as he absorbed United States President Donald Trump’s strike on Iran and his national address explaining it.

“An interesting talk,” Bannon said warily on his ‘War Room’ podcast, adding that he was not quite sure that it was what “a lot of Maga wanted to hear”.

Others were more blunt.

“I don’t want to fight or fund nuclear-armed Israel’s wars,” declared Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (Republican, Georgia), one of Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress, in a more than 600-word social media post.

Trump’s decision to attack three nuclear sites in Iran this weekend has divided supporters and unsettled some allies of his “America First” movement who embraced his campaign-trail promises to “expel the warmongers from our government”.

Republican leaders largely rallied behind the President after the strikes, but the notes of dissent were striking in a party usually in lockstep with Trump.

Bannon, typically one of Trump’s biggest boosters and a conservative influencer with a huge following, did not directly criticise the President.

But he was clearly worried about the possibility of a wider war as his listeners filled the podcast’s comments stream with objection after objection to the airstrikes.

“There are definitely some people in Maga that are not exactly ecstatic,” Bannon said.

Other prominent sceptics of intervention also have signalled that they would defer to Trump and wait to see how the conflict plays out.

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who had recently warned about a “massive schism” over foreign policy in the Maga movement, praised the “precision” of the strikes and told his five million followers on X: “The world is not over”.

The attack also won Trump praise from old-guard Republican hawks he has clashed with over the years.

Still, the prospect of escalation with Iran expanded the divide within the GOP over military intervention - and left some Republicans worried about political fallout, particularly if Iran retaliates by targeting Americans or curtailing crucial shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz, potentially increasing oil prices and undercutting the President’s promises to reduce costs.

Trump launched his political career 10 years ago by arguing that the US should focus on problems at home rather than abroad.

He criticised Republican former President George W. Bush for engaging in an ultimately unpopular war in Iraq. He attacked Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for what he described as their failed attempts to retreat from Afghanistan.

He pitched himself on the trail last year as a peacemaker who could bring a quick end to foreign conflicts.

But he has struggled to deliver on those promises since returning to office.

Recent polls show that Americans widely agree that Iranian success in developing a nuclear weapon would amount to a threat to the US.

Surveys also show that Republicans are significantly more likely to support using military force against Iran.

But polls conducted before this weekend’s bombing also found that somewhere between 25 and 30% of Republicans opposed a military strike.

“There’s a potential that … American soldiers are going to die, which - for me, that’s not America First,” said Arnie Hernandez, a 31-year-old Trump voter and activist who said he was drawn to Trump’s anti-war stance and now thinks he looks “like a hypocrite”.

Hernandez still supports Trump but said the strikes make him less inclined to back Vice-President JD Vance in a presidential primary down the line.

“People like to claim that there’s no Maga civil war, but that’s a lie,” Hernandez said.

Others in the party maintained their loyalty to Trump, even if it meant downplaying the President’s shifts - a common trend among his most ardent fans.

Conservative activist Jack Posobiec said earlier this month that a strike on Iran “would disastrously split the Trump coalition” and that Trump “smartly ran against starting new wars”.

After the attack, however, he suggested that Trump was consistent in his opposition to a war of regime change. “This is about the nuclear programme of Iran which he promised he would end from day one,” he wrote on X.

Pro-Trump activist Laura Loomer hit back at Trump’s critics and argued that they do not represent the President’s base.

Loomer sparred online with the right-wing commentator Candace Owens - who called the strike “utterly deranged” - and said in an interview that she was preparing to send the White House a list of influencers who “disrespected [Trump] and threw him under the bus”.

Loomer has previously pushed the Administration, with some success, to fire people she calls disloyal.

“There’s a lot of Johnny-come-latelys and grifters who have joined the Maga movement as a result of this toxic coalition building that we saw in 2024, where we welcomed a lot of these Democrats and Trump-haters into the party,” Loomer said in the interview.

Laura Loomer, a far-right and anti-Muslim activist, says: “America first is whatever Trump says it is”. Photo / Nicole Craine, the New York Times

She went on to criticise Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy jnr, who ran for president as an independent and then encouraged his supporters to back Trump instead.

Loomer brushed off the objections to Trump’s latest move.

“America first is whatever Trump says it is,” Loomer said.

Throughout the week, White House officials have kept in close contact with influential leaders in Trump’s base, including Bannon, Kirk, and Posobiec, to make sure they were being - and felt - heard, according to two White House officials with knowledge of the communications. Bannon and Kirk each paid a visit to the White House late last week.

Trump rejected any suggestions that his party was fracturing.

“Great unity in the Republican Party, perhaps unity like we have never seen before,” he wrote on his social media site Truth Social.

A couple of hours later, he attacked Representative Thomas Massie (Republican, Kentucky) - a critic of the bombing who is often at odds with GOP leadership - as “not Maga”. The White House did not respond to a request for additional comment today.

Vance, a longtime critic of foreign intervention, sought to dispel the base’s concerns, describing the attacks as “a very precise, a very surgical strike tailored to an American interest”.

“We have no interest in a protracted conflict,” Vance said. “We have no interest in boots on the ground. The President has actually been one of the fiercest critics of 25 years of failed foreign policy in the Middle East, which is why he did what he did.”

The attacks caused severe damage at three nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, US officials said. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has warned the US that it should expect a response, pointing to US military bases in the region.

“I certainly empathise with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East,” Vance said.

“But the difference is back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.”

The debate over bombing Iran has fed into a right-wing split over Israel and how closely the US should align with the country, a discussion that some Republicans say has veered into anti-Semitism.

Owens asserted without evidence that Trump’s decision was influenced by Miriam Adelson, an Israeli American physician and the widow of longtime Republican donor Sheldon Adelson who contributed at least US$136 million ($228m) to Trump’s campaign last year.

“If we had raised the 100 million Adelson gave him on Go Fund Me, maybe he would have kept his promises,” Owens said on X. “Guess we’ll never know.”

Many are sceptical that the bombings will affect GOP support for Trump, who has weathered controversy after controversy over 10 years on the political stage.

Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist, predicted “very little” political impact on Trump and noted that only a handful of Republican members of Congress are publicly criticising the attacks.

“This fissure is vastly overplayed, candidly,” Gorman said.

Former Fox ��һ�ǿ����� host Tucker Carlson, one of the GOP’s most prominent critics of intervention in Iran, was conspicuously silent after Trump dropped the bombs.

He has not tweeted since Friday, when he shared videos of himself debating Senator Ted Cruz (Republican, Texas) over the need to intervene.

Supporters of Trump’s move emphasised that he has repeatedly said - including on the campaign trail - that Iran must not have access to a nuclear weapon.

“Trump was elected on the basis of ‘no more stupid wars,’ ” said David Reaboi, a conservative influencer. “Most people are reasonable, and understood the key word there was ‘stupid.’”

Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Kirk’s organisation Turning Point, said that Kirk’s position has not changed since the strike and that he wants to avoid a prolonged conflict in the Middle East but also trusts the President.

“The debate around this military action is exactly the type of debate you should have before embarking on such a consequential military action,” Kolvet said in a statement. “Robust debate is a feature of our movement, not a bug.”

Differences between then and now

The intervention in the Middle East at the start of the 21st century followed the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on American soil and were initially aimed at dismantling al-Qaeda’s operations in Afghanistan.

President Bush then also invaded Iraq in 2003 amid false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction.

However, in Iran, Trump is not responding to an attack on the US and has said the bombings are intended to prevent the country from gaining nuclear capabilities.

Democrats and other critics have questioned the urgency of that goal, sometimes pointing to March testimony from Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, that US intelligence “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003”.

- Natalie Allison and Sarah Ellison contributed to this report.