更新于 2026年3月27日，美国东部时间上午7:03
发布于 2026年3月27日，美国东部时间上午5:00
作者 史蒂夫·康托诺、杰夫·西蒙
得克萨斯州葡萄藤——
作为20世纪70年代居住在伊朗的一名美国油田工人的女儿，布莱克·祖莫（Blake Zummo）亲眼目睹了伊朗革命前几年，她周围的街道如何频繁陷入暴力。
如今62岁的她居住在得克萨斯州，她驳斥了包括本周在达拉斯郊区参加保守政治行动大会（CPAC）的其他共和党人在内的观点，即唐纳德·特朗普总统正将美国拖入一场在中东不必要的战争。
“这终于出现了第一位有胆量采取必要行动来保护美国人民的总统，”祖莫在会议厅外说道。
这场被称为CPAC的大会于周四开幕，其背景是与伊朗的冲突，这暴露了共和党内部日益扩大的裂痕。这些分歧——尤其在网上显现，但也在保守派每次公开集会时浮现——让本已难以团结特朗普联盟以应对中期选举的共和党感到不安。
CPAC主席马特·施拉普（Matt Schlapp）承认，如果共和党在秋季失去参众两院，人们将对与伊朗战争的后果进行“大量讨论”，他预计这种担忧将在整个大会期间显现。
“任何时候进行军事行动，人们都会对此感到紧张，”施拉普在大会开幕前片刻告诉CNN，“CPAC的参会人群也不例外。”
施拉普表示，他不会在台上审查人们的言论，并设计了一个倾向于辩论的议程。其中包括周四的一个小组讨论，主题为“MAGA与毛拉疯狂”，参与者包括伊朗政权的受害者，而支持特朗普军事行动的前伊朗国王之子礼萨·巴列维（Reza Pahlavi）将在大会上发表讲话。在发言人之间的屏幕上，一段视频为“流亡伊朗人CPAC支持组织”（CPAC for Iranians in Exile）做宣传，该组织旨在支持伊朗的侨民群体。
参会者还听取了前众议员马特·盖茨（Matt Gaetz）的发言，而前特朗普策略师史蒂夫·班农（Steve Bannon）和黑水创始人埃里克·普林斯（Erik Prince）也将在大会上发表讲话——他们都是美国在伊朗军事行动的直言不讳的怀疑者。
本周在他的“战争室”播客中，随着特朗普向中东增派更多军队，班农向听众预测，对伊朗的军事行动将“变得非常、非常、非常难看”。
“任何告诉你不会这样的人，那些在福克斯新闻上胡吹的人，他们不在前线，他们的孩子也不在那里，”班农说，“他们与此事毫无关联，零。”
尽管特朗普目前尚未表示计划向伊朗派遣地面部队，但盖茨周四晚间警告CPAC的人群：“对伊朗发动地面入侵将使我们的国家更加贫穷且不安全。这将意味着汽油价格上涨、食品价格上涨，而且我不确定我们最终消灭的恐怖分子是否会比在伊朗制造的更多。”
“有点对特朗普失望”
不会参与这场辩论的人之一是特朗普。这位总统十年来首次未计划出席该大会。
最近的一项哥伦比亚广播公司新闻/扬基民意调查显示，特朗普的军事行动在共和党人中压倒性受欢迎，尽管自我认同为MAGA（“让美国再次伟大”）的支持者更支持（92%），而不认同该运动的共和党人支持率为70%。然而，特朗普2024年的胜选也建立在非传统选民的支持之上——年轻人、少数族裔和不满的白人男性，这些人过去很少参与选举政治。
保守派民调专家理查德·巴里（Richard Baris）表示，这些人中自认为MAGA的比例有所下降，伊朗战争加速了这一现象。巴里指出，特别是年轻人比坚定的共和党选民对以色列的怀疑要大得多，而特朗普政府在回应一些批评者的观点时做得很少，即认为以色列总理本雅明·内塔尼亚胡（Benjamin Netanyahu）正带领美国卷入另一场无休无止的中东冲突。
“现在年轻共和党人对以色列存在不满，因为他们觉得美国把以色列置于他们之上，”巴里说。
这种情绪在像亚历山大·塞尔比（Alexander Selby）这样的年轻CPAC参会者中得到体现。18岁的塞尔比是匹兹堡大学政治科学专业的学生，他表示，由于许多美国人在经济上面临困境，战争不应该是特朗普的优先事项。
“他竞选时承诺不发动新战争。当他这样做时，我真的不相信，因为如果你看看围绕他的人，很明显他永远不会这样做，”塞尔比说，“很多人——现在的保守派，年轻保守派——有点对特朗普失望，我认为我就是其中之一。”
对伊朗长期鹰派态度
几十年来，CPAC经历了几次转变——从保守派塑造政党方向的集会，变为特朗普MAGA运动的忠诚度测试——但对伊朗的鹰派警告一直是不变的主题。
共和党总统候选人——包括2008年的当时参议员约翰·麦凯恩（John McCain）、2011年的里克·桑托勒姆（Rick Santorum）和2015年的马尔科·卢比奥（Marco Rubio）——都曾来到CPAC，试图说服保守派他们会对伊朗采取强硬立场。像约翰·博尔顿（John Bolton）这样的长期伊朗强硬派曾在CPAC受到欢呼，他们猛烈抨击奥巴马总统与伊朗达成核协议。
特朗普本人在成为总统前也表达了类似的强硬立场。2015年，他在大会上明确表示，伊朗“不能拥有核武器，我们必须保护以色列”，他在2022年和2023年再次重复了这一信息。
现在，随着冲突的进行，美国长期参与的威胁不再是理论上的。“反对伊朗核联合组织”（United Against Nuclear Iran）首席执行官马克·华莱士（Mark Wallace）在大会上展示了一架伊朗无人机（他拥有的两架之一），他承认向包括许多怀疑者在内的MAGA联盟合理化这场战争面临挑战。
“美国本质上是一个孤立主义国家，这将永远是我们政治的一部分，”华莱士本周告诉CNN，“我并不害怕这一点，我认为我们应该进行自我防卫，我确实认为这次行动显然通过了越南和伊拉克的‘后遗症测试’（即战争结束后人们的反思）。”
华莱士表示，他希望在CPAC上说服保守派，伊朗与美国已经交战半个世纪，结束这种威胁将使国家和该地区更加安全。
许多人无需被说服。周四，数十名参会者与一群出席的流亡伊朗人一起在会议中心的大厅里游行，高呼政权更迭，并庆祝特朗普的军事行动。
笑容满面的祖莫也在其中。
“这是把美国放在首位，”她说。
Iran war divides conservatives on and off stage at CPAC
Updated Mar 27, 2026, 7:03 AM ET
PUBLISHED Mar 27, 2026, 5:00 AM ET
By Steve Contorno, Jeff Simon
Grapevine, Texas—
As the daughter of an American oil field worker living in Iran in the 1970s, Blake Zummo watched as the streets around her regularly descended into violence in the years before the Iranian revolution.
Now 62 and residing in Texas, she rejects arguments — including from fellow Republicans meeting this week in the Dallas suburbs for the Conservative Political Action Conference — that President Donald Trump is dragging the United States into an unnecessary war in the Middle East.
“This is finally the first president that had the nerve to go in and do what needed to be done to protect the American people,” Zummo said outside the conference hall.
The conference known as CPAC opened Thursday against the backdrop of a conflict with Iran that is exposing a growing chasm in the GOP. The divisions — playing out especially online but also each time conservatives gather in public — have unnerved a Republican Party already straining to hold together Trump’s coalition heading into the midterm elections.
CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp acknowledged there will be “a lot of conversations about the consequences” of the war with Iran if Republicans lose the House and Senate in the fall, and he anticipated that angst would be on display throughout the event.
“Any time there’s a military operation, people are nervous about it,” Schlapp told CNN moments before the conference opened. “And the CPAC population isn’t any different.”
Schlapp said he wouldn’t censor what people say from the stage and has designed a program that leans into the debate. It included a panel on Thursday called “MAGA vs. Mullah Madness” featuring victims of the Iranian regime, while Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former Iran shah who has supported Trump’s military campaign, is scheduled to address the event. On screens between speakers, a video plugged CPAC for Iranians in Exile, a group created to support the country’s diaspora.
Attendees also heard from former Rep. Matt Gaetz, and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and Blackwater founder Erik Prince will address the conference as well — all outspoken skeptics of US military action in Iran.
On his “War Room” podcast this week, as Trump moved more troops into the Middle East, Bannon predicted to his listeners that the military action in Iran was “going to get really, really, really ugly.”
“Anybody telling you otherwise, all these people going on Fox blowing smoke, they ain’t out on that front line, and they ain’t got kids out there either,” Bannon said. “They have no skin in the game. Zero.”
Though Trump hasn’t signaled so far that he plans to send troops into the country, Gaetz warned the CPAC crowd Thursday evening that “a ground invasion of Iran will make our country poorer and less safe. It will mean higher gas prices, higher food prices, and I’m not sure we would end up killing more terrorists than we would create in Iran.”
‘Kind of disillusioned with Trump’
One person who won’t be part of the debate is Trump. The president is not expected to appear at the conference for the first time in a decade.
A recent CBS News/YouGov poll showed Trump’s military action is overwhelmingly popular among Republicans, though self-identified MAGA supporters are more supportive (92%) than Republicans who don’t identify with the movement (70%). However, Trump’s 2024 victory was also built on support from nontraditional voters — young people, minorities and disaffected White men who rarely participated in electoral politics in the past.
Richard Baris, a conservative pollster, said fewer of those people are identifying as MAGA, a phenomenon that the Iran war has accelerated. Young people in particular are far more skeptical of Israel than bedrock Republican voters, Baris said, and the Trump administration has done little to counter the view among some critics that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is leading the US into another open-ended Middle East conflict.
“There’s a resentment now with younger Republicans toward Israel because they feel like the US put Israel before them,” Baris said.
That sentiment was reflected among younger CPAC attendees like Alexander Selby, an 18-year-old political science student at the University of Pittsburgh, who said the war shouldn’t be a priority for Trump as many Americans struggle economically.
“He campaigned on no new wars. I didn’t really believe that when he did it, just cause if you look at the people who surround him, it’s very obvious he was never going to do that,” Selby said. “A lot of people — conservatives, young conservatives right now are kind of disillusioned with Trump and I’d consider myself one of those.”
Long history of Iran hawkishness
CPAC has undergone several transformations over the decades — from a gathering for conservatives to shape the party’s direction to a loyalty test for Trump’s MAGA movement — but hawkish warnings about Iran have remained a constant.
GOP presidential contenders — including then-Sens. John McCain in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2011 and Marco Rubio in 2015 — have come to CPAC to convince conservatives they would stand up to Iran. Longtime Iran hardliners like John Bolton were once cheered on at CPAC while blasting President Barack Obama for negotiating a nuclear deal with the country.
Trump himself struck a similar tone before becoming president. In 2015, he unequivocally told the conference that Iran “cannot have a nuclear weapon, and we must protect Israel,” a message he repeated in 2022 and 2023.
Now, with conflict underway, the threat of a prolonged American engagement is no longer theoretical. Mark Wallace — the CEO of United Against Nuclear Iran who displayed an Iranian drone at CPAC last year (one of two he owns) — acknowledged the challenge ahead rationalizing the war to a MAGA coalition that includes many skeptics.
“The United States is fundamentally an isolationist country. That will always be a part of our politics,” Wallace told CNN this week. “I’m not afraid of that and I think we should have to defend ourselves and I do think this action very clearly meets the hangover test of Vietnam and Iraq.”
Wallace said he hopes to convince conservatives when he addresses CPAC that Iran has been at war with the US for half a century and ending the threat makes the country and the region safer.
Many people won’t need to be swayed. Dozens of attendees joined a group of exiled Iranians in attendance Thursday as they walked the halls of the conference center, chanting for regime change and celebrating Trump’s military campaign.
A beaming Zummo was among them.
“This is putting America first,” she said.