A few hours after President Donald Trump launched his attack on Iran, he called one of his favorite influencers – the far-right activist Laura Loomer – to praise him.

“I say it’s a great job and people all over the world cheer you on,” Loomer told the FT. “He made us proud to be American.”

A self-described Islamophobe, Loomer is one of a chorus of ultra-hawkish politicians, commentators and social media personalities lending their support to Trump’s attack — one of the most ambitious interventions ever attempted by the US in the Middle East.

The motley crew of Republican senators, Fox News contributors, traditional neocons and Maga ideologues are urging Trump on his quest to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, eliminate its missile capabilities and ultimately topple the country’s theocratic regime.

The coalition has continued even as the confrontation has widened in scope since it began, claiming hundreds of lives, pushing up global oil and gas prices and raising fears of a full regional war.

Even some who have traditionally been skeptical of foreign intervention and hoped Trump would follow through on his campaign promise to end US military adventurism are getting on board with the war.

“It looks like the president has the ability now to find that strong leadership (in Iran), cut the deal, secure peace and do it quickly and smartly instead of going into a long and protracted conflict,” Jack Posobiec, a far-right commentator and longtime critic of America’s “endless wars,” told Steve Bannon War Room podcast.

The cheerleaders managed to drown out the president’s rightwing critics, flooding social media with pro-Trump approbation and surrounding skeptics who questioned how the attack on Iran could reconcile Trump’s “America First” agenda.

Their strongest vitriol was reserved for Tucker Carlson, the Maga media personality who on Saturday described the bombing of Iran as “disgusting and evil”, later adding that the “war is being waged only because Israel wants it to be waged”.

Loomer said he told Trump about the “threat Tucker poses to his administration” and how he “undermined him and undermined his foreign policy decisions.”

Some go even further. Mark Levin, the rightwing radio host, demanded that critics of the war, such as Mehdi Hasan, the British-American broadcaster, be deported. He also criticized California’s Democratic senator Adam Schiff as the “enemy within” and called Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib a “Marxist-Islamist psycho”.

“We, the American people, must stand up and speak out against this deceit and treachery“Levin, whose previous posts on Iran have been frequently retweeted by Trump, told X. “We must unite around our president and armed forces and against these planners and accomplices.”

But the enthusiastic support for the war shown by people including Levin and Loomer was not shared by most Americans. A Reuters/Ipsos poll over the weekend found that only 27 percent of all adults polled supported an attack on Iran’s president.

That could decrease further if the conflict continues. “If this war starts to look like a mistake, if casualties start to rise, if it looks like Trump’s ultimate goal of regime change isn’t going well, then that will turn the public against the war,” said Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a think-tank.

“And that’s probably something that could break Trump’s grip on the Republican Party if popular views of the war continue to be negative,” he added.

For now, however, Trump’s loyalists in the party are overwhelming in their praise for the president. Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, called the attack “the most significant thing that has happened in the Mid-East in a thousand years”.

“The gold standard for Republican foreign policy is no longer Ronald Reagan: it’s Donald J Trump,” he said on Sunday.

Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, also praised the president while emphasizing his own role in the consultations that preceded the attack.

SPEAKING in the television show Face the Nation over the weekend, he said he “spent the whole day” with Trump on Friday, discussing the option of armed intervention against Iran “at length”.

“My advice to him is that the Iranian regime is not yet weakened, that it is teetering, and now is the time,” he said. “I think the president acted courageously, he acted decisively and Iran is no longer led by a theocratic, murderous dictator – which makes America much safer.”

Not everyone on the right is convinced. “(Trump) is the ‘endless wars’ candidate in 2016 and 2024, especially, and this seems like an open betrayal of the base,” said Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative magazine.

Prominent figures in the Maga movement echoed this view. Ex-congresswoman and one-time Trump acolyte Marjorie Taylor Greene in a post on social media called the war with Iran “AMERICA LAST”.

“Now Americans are coming home again in flag-draped coffins from another stupid senseless foreign war for foreign regime change for Israel,” he SAYS on Sunday.

Other social media personalities expressed similar views. Conservative commentators Kevin Hodge and Keith Hodge, who use the monicker Hodgetwins, said the “war is not as popular as the Zionist shills at X say”.

“President Trump has flat-out lied to his voters, stabbed our country and disgraced his legacy beyond repair at this point,” they WRITES in X.

Loomer, meanwhile, continues to post his support for Trump and his war while also using the conflict as an opportunity to reinforce his anti-Islamic message.

On Sunday, he called on Trump to use the military and Department of Homeland Security to “round up every Muslim immigrant and non-citizen Muslim and mass deport them from America by force”.

He told the FT he was proud to be an Islamophobe.

“I hope there will be a big anti-Islamic awakening in our country, because that’s what we need,” he said. “We need to wake people up from this barbaric ideology that has been imported into our country.”