Head-on | MAGA top guns attack Trump as India seeks strategic balance over Iran war

In his FOX News days, Tucker Carlson was a Donald Trump fanboy. No more. As a MAGA top gun with 5.3 million followers on YouTube, 6.1 million on Instagram and 13.5 million on X, Carlson has launched a fierce attack on the US president.

Tucker is not the only MAGA evangelist to turn on Trump. Megyn Kelly, whose Megyn Kelly Show attracted 138 million viewers in February 2026, has challenged what she calls Trump’s abandonment of MAGA’s first commandment: “America First”.

Carlson and Kelly say Trump promised to stop never-ending wars. Instead, Trump has sucked America into a war in Iran that could prove as costly to US interests as Vietnam and Afghanistan. Carlson, Kelly and other Republican evangelists command a large audience across various media platforms. They could coalesce into a bigger anti-Trump front within the MAGA movement at an awkward moment for Trump. Congressional midterm elections are due in November. A disunited Republican party beset with MAGA infighting could prove electorally fatal.

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Carlson has condemned Israel and believes Trump was misled into fighting the war in Iran by a scheming Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister.

In an interview with ABC News, Carlson said that the joint US-Israel attack on Iran was “absolutely disgusting and evil”. He added that it would have a significant effect for Republicans in the November Congressional midterm elections: “This is going to shuffle the deck in a profound way.”

Megyn Kelly was equally critical: “I don’t think those US service members died for the United States. I think they died for Iran or Israel.”

India has attracted criticism for aligning its interests with Israel. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s two-day visit to Israel on the eve of the US-Israel attack on Iran was seen as a deliberate tactic by Modi to appease Trump over the frozen India-US trade agreement.

The US-Israel-Iran war has placed PM Modi in a dilemma. He needs Trump’s support to close the pending India-US trade deal. He also needs to safeguard the interests of 9.5 million Indians who work in the Gulf.

PM Modi was careful not to condole Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death personally. Instead foreign secretary Vikram Misri was deputed to sign the condolence book at the Iranian embassy while External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar spoke to Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi.

The Indian prime minister made it a point to phone the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait to condemn the Iranian attacks on the Gulf states to ensure a strategic diplomatic balance.

The government reacted calmly to the sinking of Iranian warship IRIS Dena off the Sri Lankan coast, pointing out that it was not struck in Indian territorial waters. Nonetheless US military aggression in India’s strategic backyard was clearly an offensive US move. The Iranian ship had just left the MILAN-2026 multilateral naval exercise hosted by India in Visakhapatnam featuring ships from 74 countries, though notably none from the US.

For India, the US-Israel-Iran war presents several problems. The first is energy. The price of crude oil and LNG has spiked with the partial closing of the Hormuz Strait. The US Navy is promising to escort oil tankers across the strait but few commercial ships will take the risk of an Iranian missile attack on their cargo. The 30-day waiver granted by the US to allow sanctioned Russian oil to be shipped to India is a palliative.

Qatar is a major supplier of LNG to India. The closure of its LNG terminals is an additional worry for the Indian government. India’s geopolitical options are narrow. Having placed itself firmly on the side of the US, Israel and the Gulf states in the Iran war, New Delhi must be careful not to compromise its leadership of the Global South as it strives to strike a balance between competing forces in the Gulf.

Of the five founding members of BRICS, India is the only country that has taken a stand in favour of the US and Israel. China and Russia have condemned the US-Israel attack on Iran. Brazil and South Africa have been less vocal but critical of the US-Israel action.

India’s traditional ties with Iran are collateral damage. It has had to temporarily sacrifice its developmental role in the Chabahar port in Iran in lieu of the India Middle East Europe Economic Corridor (IMEEC). The ambitious project will build road, rail, sea and undersea routes from India’s west coast through the Gulf and Israel’s Haifa port all the way to Cyprus, a gateway for Indian goods to the European Union (EU).

The conflict between pragmatism and principle will, however, not be easy to resolve for India. Paradoxically, a US president weakened domestically by MAGA infighting as the war in Iran drags on can give India new strategic options. The bilateral trade agreement is in its final stages, according to US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau who was in New Delhi recently for the Raisina Dialogue 2026.

Once uncertainty over the deal is removed, the Epstein files, looming Congressional midterm elections and a military quagmire in Iran will distract Trump sufficiently for India to reassert its strategic autonomy in the Middle East.

If the Republicans lose the House of Representatives in November, which is a near certainty, Trump will be a lame-duck president for the last two years of his term. The post-Trump era could be upon us sooner than we think. It will be welcomed in India and worldwide — with the exception of Israel and the complicit states of the Gulf.

(The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)