A MAGA loyalty test

Donald Trump in the last day has appeared to take a step back from committing US troops to Israel's bombing campaign against Iran's nuclear facilities. Senior national political correspondent Nancy Cook today writes about the competing pressures on the president. Plus: A peek into the secretive world of authenticating luxury goods for resale, and five questions with Melinda French Gates.

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President Donald Trump's MAGA coalition is at risk of fracturing or, at least, not falling completely in line, as he weighs involving the US in Israel's strikes on Iran.

Loud MAGA figures such as Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have publicly urged the president to stay out of this latest Middle East conflagration. They say that Trump has spent years deriding America's yearslong, ultimately unsuccessful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that he risks breaking his promise to voters to stay out of the so-called forever wars. On Thursday, Trump said he would make a decision on whether the US would bomb Iranian nuclear weapons facilities in the next two weeks.

"The Israelis have to finish what they started. They have total air superiority. In fact, I would say they have air supremacy," says Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist at the White House. He says the president doesn't need to rush into a military situation.

Bannon. Photographer: Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg

Trump first rose to power a decade ago by preaching an "America First" doctrine, and it was a central tenet of his subsequent presidential campaigns. In 2024 it helped him form a political coalition of White working-class voters, tech and business executives, and Hispanic and Black men, all of whom worried more about the state of the economy than the politics of other countries.

By contemplating bombing Iran, Trump risks betraying his promise. Worse, he risks looking like past Americans presidents, such as George W. Bush, who went into Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks to push out the Taliban, only to have the Taliban return to running the country years later. Bush also invaded Iraq based on faulty intelligence—and both conflicts kept the US wrapped up in the complex, unforgivable politics of the Middle East.

One of Trump's national security advisers, John Bolton, wanted to bomb Iran (and North Korea) during Trump's first term, yet Trump resisted these hawkish efforts. Bolton had also supported the Iraq invasion when Bush was president.

But with little progress made to end Russia's invasion of Ukraine or to combat the rise of China, Trump looks as if he's casting about for a foreign policy win to brag about in this first year—hence, the lure of inserting the US into Israel's efforts against Iran. Trump has said he's only considering US involvement because he doesn't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

Part of his motivation may be the knowledge that any fallout with his incredibly loyal base never lasts long. Even as Bannon continues to rail against the idea of going into Iran, he too acknowledges that the MAGA faithful usually ends up following its leader. Already Trump said Carlson has called to apologize to him.

"The vast majority of the MAGA movement will go, 'Look, we trust your judgement, you've walked us through this, we don't like it, in fact maybe we hate it, but we'll get on board,'" Bannon says.

LISTEN: On the new episode of the Everybody's Business podcast, hosts Max Chafkin and Stacey Vanek Smith talk through the Mideast conflict and what it means for the global economy—and for everyone. Listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, iHeart and the Bloomberg Terminal.

In Brief

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Fighting Luxury Fakes

Scanning the delivery box with a UV light. Photographer: Julie Glassberg for Bloomberg Businessweek

Dressed in a white lab coat, Mélissa B. slips on thin cotton gloves and gently places a Zanzibar blue Hermès Birkin bag, its iconic orange box, a cloth dust cover and various documents on her desk. She steps back to eye the $18,000 purse, hunting for any bulges or bends. She runs her fingertips along the top, then picking up her pocket-size magnifying glass, she leans in to examine a palladium plate on the flap. The logo has evolved over time, but the engraved text has remained sharp and well-defined, with the characters evenly spaced. "This is one of the key Birkin features to check," she says.

She shifts her gaze to the stitching, checking for consistency and uniformity. The four palladium feet on the bottom of the bag get a check to ensure they're made of the same metal as the rest of the hardware and that they're hammered, not screwed, in place. Then she homes in on the zipper—ensuring it's one made by Hermès in-house, with its distinctive H-shaped stopper at the end.

Mélissa is among dozens of pokers and prodders employed by French luxury resale website Vestiaire Collective at its authentication center in the northern French city of Tourcoing. The facility, in a former wool-spinning mill, is the first and largest of five such locations the company runs worldwide. In the warehouse-like room filled with rows of desks surrounded by garment racks on wheels, Mélissa and her colleagues examine bags, skirts, shoes, and myriad other luxury products listed on the site. They're tasked with the Sisyphean job of detecting counterfeits coming from increasingly sophisticated operations, sometimes made with leather from the same tanneries and hardware from the same vendors as the originals.

Fighting fakes is crucial to purveyors of secondhand luxury goods. Lindsey Tramuta writes about the process, whether it matters to customers and if that Birken made the cut: Luxury Counterfeiters Keep Outsmarting the Makers of $10,000 Handbags

Philanthropy's Challenges Today

Melinda French Gates. Photographer: Chona Kasinger/Bloomberg

The billionaire philanthropist Melinda French Gates recently sat for an interview with The Circuit with Emily Chang on giving in the age of Trump. Here's a sample of the Q&A:

Critics say philanthropy has been astonishingly ineffective at solving societal problems—that giving has increased, but problems have gotten worse.

I would beg to differ. We know millions of people are alive because of the lifesaving vaccines that have been developed and given around the world. Moms and dads in low-income countries line up to get measles vaccines for their children, because you know what? A measles outbreak in their community means that kids die. Has all of philanthropy been great? No. Philanthropy is only one tool in the toolbox. Philanthropy can take a risk that we wouldn't want government to take with our taxpayer funding, but it can prove things out at scale, and then governments can come in to scale that up.

Keep reading: Five Questions for Melinda French Gates

Watch: Melinda French Gates Opens Up About Marriage, Tech and Trump

NYC Mayor's Race

20,000

That's how many individual donations New York City mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani has drawn so far. It's the most of any Democratic primary candidate since 2001, with the exception of Andrew Yang, who mounted an unsuccessful campaign in 2021.