President Donald Trump’s coalition has always been a Frankenstein’s monster — stitched together from parts that were never meant to coexist.
Consider the contradictions: fast-food fanatics hanging out with juice-cleanse truthers chanting “Make America Healthy Again” between ivermectin doses, immigration hardliners mixing with business elites who are “tough on the border” until they need someone to clean their toilets or pick their strawberries, and hawkish interventionists spooning with America Firsters.
Navigating these differences was always going to be tricky. But in recent days — particularly following Israel’s bombing of Iran, an operation widely believed to have been greenlit by Trump — the tension has reached new highs.
Signs of strain were already emerging earlier this year. We got early hints of discord during the “Liberation Day” tariff fiasco — where Trump declared an “emergency” and imposed steep tariffs, only to suspend them after they riled markets and spooked his business-friendly backers.
The tariff blunder was a harbinger of things to come. But it was the House’s passage of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — a budgetary monstrosity that self-respecting Freedom Caucus deficit hawks should’ve torched on principle — that truly exposed the rift.