Donald Trump should not sweat a hypothetical political challenge from Tucker Carlson, according to a new poll, which has found that MAGA voters overwhelmingly prefer the president to the conservative broadcaster.
Former Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed on X (Twitter) earlier this month that Carlson, who is strongly opposed to the Iran War, “would beat Trump if he ran for president and Trump tried to violate the constitution and tried to run again for a third term.”
But the new survey from JL Partners, cited by the New York Post, found that 83 percent of likely Republican voters backed the president’s judgment on Iran over that of non-interventionist pundits like Carlson and Megyn Kelly.
Another 84 percent preferred the president’s foreign policy experience to that of Carlson and Kelly, and 85 percent said they took Trump more seriously than the former Fox News hosts.
More generally, the poll found that 83 percent of conservatives “strongly” or “somewhat” support the administration’s Operation Epic Fury campaign against Tehran, which has seen retaliatory airstrikes hit U.S. and Israeli targets across the Middle East, 13 American troops killed, and global oil prices surge.
By contrast, just 9 percent of respondents said they “strongly” or “somewhat” oppose the military action.
Almost three-quarters of those surveyed, 74 percent, said the U.S. should continue its bombing raids until Iran’s military capabilities have been completely wiped out, with only 16 percent calling on the president to end the conflict immediately.
In addition, 78 percent of those polled said they were more likely to back a pro-war Republican congressional candidate in future elections, with just 10 percent likely to back an objector.
Trump has largely resisted taking the bait and responding to criticism of his airstrikes from Carlson and Kelly, although he has said that the former has “lost his way” and posted a Truth Social message in support of another right-leaning commentator, Mark Levin, after he got caught up in a bitterly personal exchange of insults with the latter.
The Post argued the poll proved that claims Trump’s base was fracturing over the war were “greatly exaggerated,” but Carlson and Kelly are by no means the only prominent conservatives to have spoken out.
Influencer Carrie Prejean Boller, for instance, declared emphatically earlier this week: “MAGA is dead. It is deader than dead. And Americans are furious. We do not recognize President Donald J Trump anymore.”
The new poll is also not the only one to indicate unwavering support for Trump and his movement, with an NBC News survey earlier this week finding 90 percent approval for the airstrikes among MAGA supporters and a 100 percent approval rating for the president himself.
Discussing the latter statistic on CNN, the network’s data analyst, Harry Enten, was visibly astonished and said: “You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to know you can’t go higher than one hundred percent.”
He compared Trump’s popularity to that of the Super Bowl-winning Miami Dolphins teams of 1972 and added, “Now, there are some Republicans who disapprove of Donald John Trump, but they are not members of the Make America Great Again movement.
“The bottom line is this: if you are a member of MAGA, you approve of Donald Trump.”
US aid deals with religious element risk ‘fanning flames of division’
Musk’s former PR consultant says she ‘courted’ Epstein to try to dig up dirt on Trump
Intelligence chiefs back in Congress to face House grilling on Iran: Live
Senator claims that people need to have an ID to have a child
Hegseth again uses Iran war update to tear into media and says ‘we’re winning’
US waters down assessment of China’s threat to Taiwan ahead of Trump-Xi summit
