Donald Trump ‘spanked and put in corner’ MAGA warrior Tucker Carlson with his Iran strikes

Donald Trump “thrashed,” “spanked and put in a corner” MAGA warrior and online media personality Tucker Carlson with his Iran strikes, one of the United States’ leading Middle East analysts has said.

Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst who froze Hamas and al-Qaeda’s funding sources while at the US Treasury, said the US President had done the right thing in defying prominent isolationists in the Make America Great Again movement to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend.

Mr Schanzer, author of multiple books on the region, and now executive director of the Washington-based think tank Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, said that Mr Trump may even have been prompted to target Iran sooner due to the civil war that was erupting amongst his supporters.

Tucker Carlson’s video interview with Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who backed US military intervention in Iran, went viral when he berated the US Senator for not knowing the population of Iran whilst advocating regime change.

The MAGA warrior was one of many prominent America First followers, including Mr Trump’s one-time adviser Steve Bannon, who were strongly arguing that any intervention would violate the President’s vow made on the campaign trail to avoid dragging the US into new forever wars.

Mr Trump also publicly rebuked his Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who had disputed Israel’s intelligence, claiming Iran was moving closer towards obtaining a nuclear bomb and said she was wrong. She fell into line after the President’s repudiation.

Vice President JD Vance said in March that the Iranians were making concessions and making progress, but this changed in mid-May when the Iranians began stonewalling.

“That was the real catalyst,” Mr Vance said.

Last Thursday, Mr Trump said that he would decide in two weeks whether or not to take part in Israel’s campaign against Iran.

He shocked many when on Saturday night he announced the US military had successfully carried out Operation Midnight Hammer and claimed the “total obliteration” of Iran’s nuclear program.

“ Some of the key figures that were against this came around,” Mr Schanzer said in an interview with the Latika Takes podcast.

“Maybe they saw the way that Donald Trump thrashed Tucker Carlson, who had challenged what MAGA was.

“And Donald Trump said, I decide what is MAGA. You do not. And he was spanked and put in a corner.

“Donald Trump has seemed to set the party straight.”

Other prominent MAGA figures opposing any military action against Iran included Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the firebrand Republican, whose partner Brian Glenn asked Ukraine’s President Volodmyr Zelensky why he wasn’t wearing a suit to the White House during the infamous dressing down.

“Anyone slobbering for the US to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First, MAGA,” she wrote on X.

“We are sick and tired of foreign wars. All of them.

“And this one will quickly engulf the Middle East, BRICS, and NATO as countries are required to take a side.”

After Trump’s actions, Taylor Greene said she disagreed with the bombings but still supported Mr Trump.

“Trump is not a king, MAGA is not a cult, and President Trump has surrounded himself with people who once disagreed with him and even ran against him for President,” she said.

“Neocon warmongers beat their drums of war and act like Billy badasses going to war in countries most Americans have never seen and can’t find on a map, but never find the courage to go to war against the actual terrorists who actually do kill Americans, invade our land, and make BILLIONS doing it day after day, year after year.

“Now what has been done is done, and Americans now fear Iranian terrorist attacks on our own soil and being dragged into another war by Netanyahu when we weren’t even thinking about any of this a week ago.”

Bannon, speaking on his podcast, criticised Mr Trump’s strikes as “incrementalism.

“If they hit back at American troops, do we go back in and hit again?” Bannon said.

“Next thing you know, brother, you’re in a forever war.”

Mr Trump hailed the “great unity” in the Republican party after making his Saturday evening address to the nation.

But Mr Schanzer warned against reading any doctrine into Trump’s actions in Iran.

“Donald Trump makes these decisions,” he said.

“He has given himself maximum flexibility, and his party has, and his voters have too.

“ Donald Trump gets to decide if he wants to decide, start fighting the Houthis, and then wants to end it.

“If he wants to engage with Israel and to partner with them on Iran for a night, he can do it.

“And then he can go back to being quasi-isolationist.”

Checkmate? Israel takes out the Queen

Mr Schanzer, who maintains high-level contacts in the region and is fluent in Arabic and Hebrew, said the Israelis had likened their campaign against Iran and its proxies — Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon to chess.

“They lost some pieces on the board early — pawns — but they still lost pieces, and they looked like they were about to lose,” Mr Schanzer said.

“They came back and they started taking pieces off the board, one at a time, Hamas, Hezbollah. Syria just collapsed.

“So all of those pieces are gone and these are bishops and knights — these are stronger pieces for the regime.

“What they had left was their queen – that was the nuclear program – the queen has just been knocked off the board.

“The king is right now standing alone with some pawns.”

Mr Schanzer said while he was not a fan of the way Benjamin Netanyahu had executed power as Israel’s prime minister, his strategic understanding of the region was second to none.

“ I think the anti-democratic tendencies of a man who’s been in power for that long – they bother me,” he said.

“But I will say that his strategic understanding of the region cannot be questioned any longer.

“He has taken out now the head of the octopus after chopping off all of the tentacles.”

Will Iran retaliate?

The Trump Administration has stressed that it is not at war with Iran or seeking a prolonged attack.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters at the Pentagon that: “This mission was not, has not been about regime change.”

Vice-President JD Vance told Meet the Press: “We do not want war with Iran. We actually want peace, but we want peace in the context of them not having a nuclear weapons program.”

He said he empathised with those who were “exhausted” after a quarter of a century of foreign entanglements in the Middle East.

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

“So this is not going to be some long, drawn-out thing.”

Mr Schanzer said that Israelis may continue pushing until the regime implodes.

But he said one immediate threat could be Iran retaliating through terrorist attacks in Western countries.

“The big question we have to ask ourselves right now is whether this thing triggers asymmetric attacks,” he said.

“And if that is the case, and I hope that it’s not … the important thing is to not overreact.

“Because that’s what we did last time, right?

“We overreacted to a terrorist attack, and it led to the conquest of countries across the Middle East and the expenditure of trillions of dollars, and everything was smouldering in its wake.

“We need to be judicious here. There are ways of ending this regime, even if they decide to engage in these asymmetric attacks.”

Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, who opposed Trump’s unilateral order, also warned of attacks on US bases in the region as well as the likelihood of terror attacks on US soil.

“We could see terror attacks here,” he told NBC.

“The escalatory factor of this action … is significant.”

He said the Iranians were “in the process” and “doing something” the US did not want them to do by enriching uranium to 60 per cent, but that that did not mean they were making a nuclear bomb.