Will Democrats Gain from MAGA’s Schism over Foreign Policy?

The Venezuela intervention challenges Trump’s “America First” posture with voters.

In the run-up to the new year, political observers were struck by the degree of public feuding in MAGA’s camp. Some even ventured that there are serious fissures in Donald Trump’s coalition, particularly over what constitutes “America First” and who is welcome among their tribe. Much of the drama, though, revolved around the Epstein files, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s stunning break with Trump, and the GOP’s internecine battles over the influence of extremist right-wing commentators like the antisemite Nick Fuentes—battles that hadn’t necessarily redounded to the Democrats’ benefit in the polls. The question as 2026 began was whether Democrats could find ways to exploit these growing discontents while maintaining their newfound focus on affordability.

The potential fallout from the U.S. military’s audacious capture of Venezuela’s autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, on January 3rd under Trump’s order (without consultation of Congress or a formal declaration of war) could soon embolden Democrats to challenge Trump on his own ideological terrain. So far, Trump’s decision—justified as fighting “narcoterrorism” but evidently motivated by personal animus and a stated desire to take control of Venezuela’s oil—has polled poorly with independents and reinforced the general public’s perception that Trump is increasingly divorced from their everyday concerns. Based on Trump’s bellicosity, we also have reason to fear the Venezuela intervention is the opening gambit of a predatory doctrine euphemistically called “flexible realism.” While Trump has unabashedly declared he, as commander-in-chief, is bound only by his “own morality,” many Americans are certain to oppose this further concentration of executive power.

Indeed, there should be little doubt that any concrete commitment to expansionism would prove massively unpopular outside of Trump’s most ardent supporters. And the ire that such an atavistic strategy is likely to elicit from voters fed up with military adventurism, endless wars of choice, and gargantuan, opaque defense budgets presents Democrats with a clear opportunity to cast Trump’s second term as a parade of betrayals. Perhaps more than any other event, the Maduro affair symbolizes the disjuncture between the issues that expanded Trump’s coalition in 2024 and a record that has already disenchanted his “soft” and “shy” supporters. At this precarious moment, Democrats shouldn’t hesitate to frame Trump’s gamble—a reversion to Cold War-style meddling liable to yield major and unanticipated consequences—as putting ordinary Americans dead last.

These tremors of a new era don’t require Democrats to overhaul their midterm strategy. Foreign policy usually doesn’t determine elections on its own, and bread-and-butter issues remain paramount to the public. Nevertheless, in pessimistic times a sudden increase in military action can highlight for disillusioned voters how their priorities have been neglected or betrayed. Democrats should act accordingly. As several center-left reports have stressed, courting MAGA’s more tenuous followers—especially those who hoped Trump would follow through on rebuilding at home and ceasing costly foreign entanglements—will be key to winning back the House and improving the Democrats’ competitiveness in the Senate and Electoral College. And Trump, by deposing Maduro, threatening more interventions, and antagonizing U.S. allies like Denmark, Canada, and Mexico, has provided another foil for Democrats on top of a weakening economy.

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To fully take advantage of this moment, however, Democrats must face up to why voters previously opposed to Trump came to see him as more credible than Joe Biden—not least in the realm of foreign affairs. Trump’s comeback, after all, was driven by a basic promise to deal with inflation but also to reduce government dysfunction and global chaos. Though it sounded patently infeasible to progressives, Trump even boasted he would play the “peacemaker.” Biden’s record didn’t make it easy to counter this narrative. Instead of the return to normalcy Biden had pledged, prices, the border, and international conflicts spiraled out of control on his watch.

More than Democrats care to admit, that acute sense of drift on the world stage played into Trump’s hands. As in domestic affairs, Biden assured he would reaffirm America’s leadership abroad. Although Biden had fashioned a reputation over his Senate career as a foreign policy expert, many Americans doubted his command of the issues as president. As 2024 progressed, Americans increasingly felt his Ukraine and Middle East policies were either overextending America’s foreign commitments with no convincing endgame or compromising the nation’s moral authority. While Biden’s mounting foreign policy woes didn’t tip the election, they likely contributed to last-minute defections to Trump and dampened Democratic turnout in left-leaning cities in key states like Michigan.

That messy legacy underscores that there are hazards of duking it out with Trump over foreign affairs without a clear and strong countervision. Older ghosts from the Cold War and “War on Terror” linger too, unfortunately. Democratic leaders still struggle to connect strategic restraint with resolve; they are perennially afraid of looking “weak” and “indecisive” on national security, even when interventionism courts disaster and national decline. That inhibits their ability to adapt and reform their Wilsonian tradition for an age of multipolarity and formulate a consistent and honorable alternative to more militant interpretations of “peace through strength.”

In fact, many party elites remain wedded to a paradigm that tacitly endorses America’s role as a global policeman—one that doesn’t offer a compelling contrast to Trump’s, or at least his original concept of “America First.” Liberal internationalists believe the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” is precipitating the final rupture with the postwar order, which the Biden administration had tasked itself with saving. Yet for many understandably weary voters, particularly younger Americans who reject American exceptionalism and see the “rules-based order” as stained with moral hypocrisy, that was an obligation no longer worth carrying. Now, to the dismay of those who champion America’s global leadership, warnings that Trump’s amoral power politics will only embolden Russia and China in their own “backyards” no longer seem to resonate much with the electorate.

However dispiriting, that dynamic suggests it is better in the short term for Democrats to attack Trump for abandoning what he was ostensibly elected to do: to drive down costs and lessen America’s geopolitical burdens. Still, there is no guarantee it will work. Scandals and transgressions that would have destroyed past presidencies have been met with public indifference or resignation, and Trump’s own sprawling foreign policy may end up a sideshow to other issues. Democrats, moreover, have little appetite to address their own longstanding divisions over how to wield American hard power. Despite their professed alarm over Trump’s actions, they may choose the safer course and make the 2026 midterms a referendum strictly on the economy.

It’s also unclear what, at this stage, could truly drive a wedge between Trump and the MAGA faithful. In an unexpected reproof of the White House, five Senate Republicans, including Missouri’s Josh Hawley, a right-populist heretofore loyal to Trump, have backed a new war powers resolution advanced by Democrats. But the dissent on the right has otherwise been muted, even among deep skeptics of regime change. According to Politico’s Ian Ward, prominent right-wing thinkers and influencers linked to the administration have flipped the script and argued that military raids and uninhibited saber-rattling conform just fine to “America First” principles. While they may be taking their cues from above, there has been no rebellion from below to prompt them to act otherwise. Partisan Republicans have strongly approved of the Venezuela intervention in post-raid polls and interviews, praising, in particular, the operation’s swift and sophisticated execution. In these respects, Democrats have few obvious avenues to profit from pointing out “America First” has lost whatever coherence it once had.

And yet, a good deal of 2024 Trump voters—as well as his more regular supporters in the Rust Belt—plainly didn’t vote for this. Nor did they vote for a year’s worth of escalating air strikes in the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean—over 600, according to a new report. Much as Trump’s newer converts didn’t think they were voting for federal cuts to the safety net or needless tariffs on basic food imports, they didn’t expect him to resurrect the discredited interventionism of the George W. Bush years. They had hoped, however naively, that Trump’s strongman instincts would be channeled toward corporate jawboning and international dealmaking that improved their economic prospects.

Such assumptions weren’t completely unfounded, however. Trump, it should be remembered, repeatedly postured as a different kind of Republican, coldly unmoved by moral arguments about America’s global responsibilities but also circumspect about the use of force. During his first term, expert opinion varied as to whether he was a misguided isolationist, a Russian asset, or a tinpot warmonger; between bouts of jingoistic bluster, Trump tried to forge an image as an iconoclast willing to engage “rogue states.” In a highly symbolic move in September 2019, he fired John Bolton, his third National Security Advisor and an arch hawk historically loathed by the left, over a series of policy disagreements. Among America Firsters as well as the “Trump-curious,” that action proved Trump would refuse to be shackled by the empire-obsessed “foreign policy blob.”

Of course, the fantasy of “Trump the dove” was fairly preposterous. It was based on a selective reading of events that downplayed, among other things, his expansion of drone strikes. Since returning to office, Trump’s capacity for radicalization, already revealed on January 6th, 2021, has become more palpable still, as demonstrated by the ruthlessness of his immigration crackdown; it took a certain credulousness to think his volatility and need to look tough wouldn’t eventually lead to conflicts he was entrusted not to pursue.

Democrats hoping to woo voters let down by Trump must nevertheless approach them humbly given the trust deficit they too must overcome. That should be doable provided the overtures are sincere. The thornier challenge is figuring out how to effectively communicate that the “Donroe Doctrine” invites all sorts of trouble when Democrats have already exhausted the “No Kings” rhetoric. While some Trump sympathizers might hope the Maduro affair is a surgical one-off and not a preview of misadventures and occupations to come, Trump’s brusque admission in a New York Times interview that his proposal to “run” Venezuela could take “much longer” than a year cannot be dismissed as mere theater. It is, rather, another way of asserting he is unbeholden to any set of norms or constraints, including voters who expected a much different set of priorities. The unenviable task for Democrats is to impress upon cynical voters that this time is different and more dangerous.

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Granted, to assail Trump’s lack of fidelity to principles and voters might seem a fruitless endeavor. More Trump voters will bend to whatever Trump says “America First” is than not, and Democrats have struggled in the past to cast Trump’s mercurial nature as a fundamental weakness. Attempting to convince Trump-leaning voters that the Venezuela intervention marks the start of an ugly new chapter in American militarism might not be worth the effort.

Yet, if there is any throughline in the MAGA movement besides hardline immigration restrictionism, it is a neo-Jacksonian outlook tempered by the excesses of neoconservative globalism. Adherents are still willing to punch adversaries hard and dispense with “the niceties of international law,” as historian Walter Russell Mead remarked at the turn of the century. But today’s breed—extending from paleoconservatives and Obama-Trump Democrats to socially conservative immigrants and “politically homeless” voices once aligned with either the old anti-war left or Ron Paul’s libertarianism—is arguably far more skeptical of flimsy justifications for regime change and myopic “gunboat diplomacy” than prior Jacksonians were. It is these less martial Trump voters who are very likely concerned by what the “Donroe Doctrine” portends and whose continued support for the GOP is conditional on Trump actually sticking to his original “America First” pitch.

Democrats, accordingly, ought to court these and other disaffected voters on the same terms Trump did. He spoke relentlessly of broken promises, linking offshored jobs and unraveling communities to the same unaccountable “swamp” that had prosecuted and funded, through mountains of national debt, poorly justified wars fueled by ideology and mission creep. The Democratic overture to spooked Americans may be equally straightforward: Trump promised and failed to put pocketbook issues first and is now recklessly pursuing the same military interventions he swore to scale back.

Still, any Democratic strategy to confront the new Trump doctrine will only succeed if it extends beyond raw criticism. Democrats need to convey in no uncertain terms that voters are right to be angry with Washington’s endless policy capture, that their party will do everything to reassert powers Congress has virtually abdicated, and that they will renew the vision of prudent defense and domestic reinvestment that animated Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. Above all, though, Democrats must map a path to security, peace, and prosperity that speaks, with conviction, to American ideals—and relieves the country of the folly and tragedy that have damaged America’s standing in the 21st century.