Ben Shapiro believes the idea that conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly could undermine support for Donald Trump is “insane,” he told “The Sunday Briefing” co-anchor Jacqui Heinrich Sunday.
“Those people, though, do have considerable social followings. How big of an issue do you take this to be for the Republican base?” Heinrich asked Shapiro of Carlson and Kelly, who have each voiced a lack of support for Trump’s war in Iran.
“I don’t think it’s a major issue for the Republican base,” Shapiro said. “I think the president is exactly right to call this out for what it is, which is people who have fringe audiences — large numbers, but fringe audiences in terms of the broader overall Republican audiences. Multiple polls have shown over the course of the last month and a half that the president has 80-90% support inside the Republican party for his actions in Iran.”
Shapiro also insisted that a recent survey from J.L. Partners that shows only 6% of Republicans support the pair backs up his claim.
“I think the idea that these folks are going to be able to undermine broad scale support for a war that will reach its terminus sometime in the next couple of months, I think that’s insane,” he continued. “I think the idea that these folks are going to be able to undermine broad scale support for a war that will reach its terminus sometime in the next couple of months, I think that’s insane.”
Elsehwhere in the interview, Shapiro insisted that people who claim Trump has changed his narrative on Iran need to “touch grass.”
“I mean, obviously, I think that the algorithmic disconnect is quite real. You see it particularly on X, but you also see it on TikTok and other social media. People need to touch grass. Go talk to the people you go to church with and what you will find out is that most of those people agree with the President of the United States, the vast majority of conservatives have agreed for 50 years that the Iranian regime is a threat to the United States, to its allies, to the region and to the world,” Shaprio said. “And this President is making the bravest foreign policy move of my lifetime and actually keeping a promise that he may back in 1980, that he would take on the Iranian regime if ever he got the power.”
Carlson recently described Trump’s writing “Praise be to Allah” in his broadly threatening Truth Social messages as “evil.”
“A lot of his positions are the right positions, but you cannot support that,” he said. “That is evil. That is an intentional desecration of beauty and truth, which is the definition of evil.”
In March Kelly said she worries Trump will destroy what the Republican party has built in recent years.
“We seem to have a new goal in ending this war, which is, we need to open the Strait of Hormuz,” Kelly said at the time. “You mean the strait that was open before we began the bombing campaign? It was open. There was no problem with the Strait of Hormuz. It was fine. The reason it’s closed is because we decided to start a war, and this is the only thing these guys can control, and they know it, and they’re doing it rather effectively.”
