Iran war divides conservatives on and off stage at CPAC
By Steve Contorno, Jeff Simon, CNN
Grapevine, Texas (CNN) — As the daughter of an American oil field worker living in Iran in the 1970s, Blake Zummo watched as the streets around her regularly descended into violence in the years before the Iranian revolution.
Now 62 and residing in Texas, she rejects arguments — including from fellow Republicans meeting this week in the Dallas suburbs for the Conservative Political Action Conference — that President Donald Trump is dragging the United States into an unnecessary war in the Middle East.
“This is finally the first president that had the nerve to go in and do what needed to be done to protect the American people,” Zummo said outside the conference hall.
The conference known as CPAC opened Thursday against the backdrop of a conflict with Iran that is exposing a growing chasm in the GOP. The divisions — playing out especially online but also each time conservatives gather in public — have unnerved a Republican Party already straining to hold together Trump’s coalition heading into the midterm elections.
CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp acknowledged there will be “a lot of conservations about the consequences” of the war with Iran if Republicans lose the House and Senate in the fall, and he anticipated that angst would be on display throughout the event.
“Any time there’s a military operation, people are nervous about it,” Schlapp told CNN moments before the conference opened. “And the CPAC population isn’t any different.”
Schlapp said he wouldn’t censor what people say from the stage and has designed a program that leans into the debate. It included a panel on Thursday called “MAGA vs. Mullah Madness” featuring victims of the Iranian regime, while Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former Iran shah who has supported Trump’s military campaign, is scheduled to address the event. On screens between speakers, a video plugged CPAC for Iranians in Exile, a group created to support the country’s diaspora.
Attendees also heard from former Rep. Matt Gaetz, and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and Blackwater founder Erik Prince will address the conference as well — all outspoken skeptics of US military action in Iran.
On his “War Room” podcast this week, as Trump moved more troops into the Middle East, Bannon predicted to his listeners that the military action in Iran was “going to get really, really, really ugly.”
“Anybody telling you otherwise, all these people going on Fox blowing smoke, they ain’t out on that front line, and they ain’t got kids out there either,” Bannon said. “They have no skin in the game. Zero.”
Though Trump hasn’t signaled so far that he plans to send troops into the country, Gaetz warned the CPAC crowd Thursday evening that “a ground invasion of Iran will make our country poorer and less safe. It will mean higher gas prices, higher food prices, and I’m not sure we would end up killing more terrorists than we would create in Iran.”
‘Kind of disillusioned with Trump’
One person who won’t be part of the debate is Trump. The president is not expected to appear at the conference for the first time in a decade.
A recent CBS News/YouGov poll showed Trump’s military action is overwhelmingly popular among Republicans, though self-identified MAGA supporters are more supportive (92%) than Republicans who don’t identify with the movement (70%). However, Trump’s 2024 victory was also built on support from nontraditional voters — young people, minorities and disaffected White men who rarely participated in electoral politics in the past.
Richard Baris, a conservative pollster, said fewer of those people are identifying as MAGA, a phenomenon that the Iran war has accelerated. Young people in particular are far more skeptical of Israel than bedrock Republican voters, Baris said, and the Trump administration has done little to counter the view among some critics that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is leading the US into another open-ended Middle East conflict.
“There’s a resentment now with younger Republicans toward Israel because they feel like the US put Israel before them,” Baris said.
That sentiment was reflected among younger CPAC attendees like Alexander Selby, an 18-year-old political science student at the University of Pittsburgh, who said the war shouldn’t be a priority for Trump as many Americans struggle economically.
“He campaigned on no new wars. I didn’t really believe that when he did it, just cause if you look at the people who surround him, it’s very obvious he was never going to do that,” Selby said. “A lot of people — conservatives, young conservatives right now are kind of disillusioned with Trump and I’d consider myself one of those.”
Long history of Iran hawkishness
CPAC has undergone several transformations over the decades — from a gathering for conservatives to shape the party’s direction to a loyalty test for Trump’s MAGA movement — but hawkish warnings about Iran have remained a constant.
GOP presidential contenders — including then-Sens. John McCain in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2011 and Marco Rubio in 2015 — have come to CPAC to convince conservatives they would stand up to Iran. Longtime Iran hardliners like John Bolton were once cheered on at CPAC while blasting President Barack Obama for negotiating a nuclear deal with the country.
Trump himself struck a similar tone before becoming president. In 2015, he unequivocally told the conference that Iran “cannot have a nuclear weapon, and we must protect Israel,” a message he repeated in 2022 and 2023.
Now, with conflict underway, the threat of a prolonged American engagement is no longer theoretical. Mark Wallace — the CEO of United Against Nuclear Iran who displayed an Iranian drone at CPAC last year (one of two he owns) — acknowledged the challenge ahead rationalizing the war to a MAGA coalition that includes many skeptics.
“The United States is fundamentally an isolationist country. That will always be a part of our politics,” Wallace told CNN this week. “I’m not afraid of that and I think we should have to defend ourselves and I do think this action very clearly meets the hangover test of Vietnam and Iraq.”
Wallace said he hopes to convince conservatives when he addresses CPAC that Iran has been at war with the US for half a century and ending the threat makes the country and the region safer.
Many people won’t need to be swayed. Dozens of attendees joined a group of exiled Iranians in attendance Thursday as they walked the halls of the conference center, chanting for regime change and celebrating Trump’s military campaign.
A beaming Zummo was among them.
“This is putting America first,” she said.
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