The crack-up of the antisemitic right
Support for the Iran war among the GOP
base and President Trump’s intervention in the podcast wars signal that
the Tucker Carlson wing of the GOP has hit a dead-end.
There is no more prominent antisemite in the United States than former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. With a huge audience tuning into his conspiratorial rants about Israel and the Jews on his podcasts, and banking on the credit he earned during an earlier phase of his career when he appeared very much within the conservative mainstream, the political commentator has considerable influence.
His ability to help circulate traditional tropes of antisemitism in the American public square, which has dovetailed with similar messages coming out of the political left, has helped create the impression that his views represent the future of the American right. That assumption, however, is being challenged by a person with far more clout with Republicans. And his name is Donald Trump.
With recent statements and social-media posts, the president has made it clear to his followers and the party he leads that, though they may turn to Carlson and his allies on the far right for internet entertainment, he opposes Carlson’s brand of antisemitism and crackpot views on foreign policy that consistently take the side of America’s enemies.
Anti-Israel podcasters
Carlson
may have thought Trump’s courageous decision to face up to the threat
posed to the West by Iran was the opening he needed to help hijack
conservatism or the GOP itself. But with polls showing that most
Republicans, and especially the so-called MAGA base, overwhelmingly back
Trump on Israel and Iran, the notion that Carlson’s views represent
majority opinion on the right has been exposed as being as much an
internet-manufactured myth as the conspiracy theories he regularly
floats on his podcast.
That said, the problem is bigger than just one man.
His efforts to blame the Jewish state and its supporters for the current war with Iran (and just about everything else that is bad) are seconded and even exceeded by other, even more extreme voices on the far right, such as the unhinged Candace Owens and the neo-Nazi groyper Nick Fuentes. Others with a claim to a slightly more mainstream following, like fellow Fox News alumni Megyn Kelly, run interference for them in an effort to push their anti-Zionism and toxic myths about Jews within the so-called Overton Window of acceptable discourse.
These podcasters are aligned with marginal figures within the Republican Party, like former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and bolstered by off-the-record comments of anti-Israel figures in secondary and minor posts in the Trump administration. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, was willing to defend Carlson and denounce his critics, even though his comments were rather awkwardly walked back. But it brought to light the fact that some otherwise respectable figures within the conservative think tank world, along with many young people on the right, were avid followers of Carlson and the groypers.
More ominously, Vice President JD Vance’s decision to take a stand of public neutrality on Carlson’s antisemitism and Israel derangement seemed a harbinger of a sea change in Republican politics. It indicated that the politician considered to have the inside track to be Trump’s successor would take the GOP in a very different direction from its current pro-Israel position.
Antisemitic appointee resigns
Some
of Carlson’s friends—and those of Vance—also found jobs in the Trump
2.0 administration. Leaks on debates within the government about strikes
against Iran and the terrorists Houthis in Yemen last year, as well as
the current campaign against Tehran, revealed that there was a loud if
not particularly numerous constituency for isolationism and hostility to
Israel inside the Republican tent.
One such person was Joe Kent, a former Army Ranger who had been appointed as the director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center. Kent publicly resigned this week in protest of the Iran war, which he said Israel had drawn the United States into. His resignation letter was a collection of false claims about malign Jewish influence on the administration, including the myth that the Jewish state had persuaded President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003. In fact, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had warned the Americans not to start a conflict there.
Kent’s resignation was celebrated by fellow antisemites, like Owens, while being welcomed by most Republicans, who wondered how and why such a person had managed to be put in such a position in the first place.
The story was highlighted in the liberal press as a sign of the breakdown of Trump’s electoral coalition. While there’s no question that isolationists and Jew-haters have a foothold within the GOP, this is a misreading of the situation. Anyone assuming that such views are on the verge of taking over the GOP is jumping to conclusions that are more the product of internet and social-media hype than actual political clout.
And the person who is making that crystal clear to Carlson, Kelly, Greene and perhaps even Vance is still the one individual in the conservative ecosphere whose opinion matters more than anyone else.
Trump cracks down on Tucker
As
anger about Carlson’s growing hate-mongering grew, Trump remained
largely above the fray. His pro-Israel policies were a standing rebuke
to Carlson and the groypers. He even went so far as to label the
podcaster as “kooky” after he criticized America’s participation in last summer’s 12-day air campaign against Iran.
In the weeks after Vance declined to side with the critique by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro of Carlson’s stands on Israel and the Jews, Trump specifically stated in a New York Times interview that antisemites had no place in the Republican Party. While reminding the country that he has a Jewish daughter and grandchildren, the president in speaking of Jew-haters, declared that “we don’t like them” and “we don’t need them.”
Carlson was still welcomed at the White House and seemed to retain his perch, even as administration sources and others have claimed that at a meeting in January, the president warned the podcaster to tone down his anti-Israel and anti-Jewish act. Photos of the podcaster at a meeting in the executive mansion seemed to signal that he had retained his perch as a friend of Vance and Donald Trump Jr., who is also his business partner.
But after Carlson called the current campaign against Iran “evil,” Trump didn’t mince words about his former supporter. Declaring that he had “lost his way,” the president read Carlson out of his “Make America Great Again” movement last week, saying: “I knew that a long time ago, and he’s not MAGA.”
“MAGA is saving our country. MAGA is making our country great again. MAGA is America first, and Tucker is none of those things,” Trump said. “Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that.”
Nor was that the only instance in which Trump chose to intervene in the right-wing podcast wars. Mark Levin, the pro-Israel Fox News commentator and radio host, got into a heated exchange with Kelly over her neutrality about the antisemitic rantings of Carlson and Owens, as well as her praise of Fuentes. The argument escalated as Kelly endorsed the false narrative about Israel and its supporters dragging the United States into war with Iran.
Rather than stand aloof from a dispute in which Kelly, Carlson and their supporters smeared Levin, Trump used his Truth Social platform to join in the argument. He called Levin a “great American patriot” and branded his critics as having “far less intellect, capability and love for our country.”
Trump said Carlson, Kelly and others “are not MAGA. I am.”
What’s more, he added that the movement means “not allowing Iran—a sick, demented and violent terrorist regime—to have a nuclear weapon to blow up the United States of America, the Middle East and, ultimately, the rest of the World. MAGA is about stopping them cold, and that is exactly what we are doing.”
MAGA Republicans back the war
And though liberal media, like the Times, continue to claim that the rift among Republicans about the war with Iran is widening, polling suggests otherwise.
While the Iran war is generally unpopular, with a strong plurality opposing it, the president’s own party and the majority of GOP voters who identify as MAGA support it. A YouGov America poll reported that 76% of Republicans approve of the war, while 85% of MAGA Republicans back it. And though Trump’s personal favorability ratings are down in the second year of his current term from where they were a year ago, he’s still supported by more than 81% of Republicans—staggering numbers that are comparable to the support that popular presidents like Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama got from their parties.
This isn’t surprising. Despite the claims from both left-wing and right-wing Trump critics that he is betraying his pre-election foreign-policy pledges, there was never any doubt about his stand on Iran and its mullahs. Throughout his political career, including during his first term, the president was an ardent critic of the Democrats’ appeasement of Tehran and, as was the case with his predecessors, had declared that he would never allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. The only difference is, as he has done on other issues, Trump aims to keep his promise on that score, even if it means the use of force. And most Republicans, MAGA and non-MAGA alike, support that stand while recognizing that the current campaign alongside America’s Israeli ally bears no resemblance to past misadventures in the Middle East that they oppose.
This adds to a political equation in which the idea of a conservative crack-up in which Trump’s far-right critics are in a position to contest Trump’s control of the GOP, let alone become a dominant faction, remains a fantasy. The only people who believe this is possible are the battalion of podcast conspiracy mongers themselves and their left-wing counterparts who, though they differ on many issues, share their hostility to Israel and inclination to mainstream tropes of antisemitism.
Could this change?
Washington and Jerusalem have already taken out much of the Islamist regime’s nuclear and ballistic-missile capacity, as well as eliminated many of its leaders, and destroyed the bulk of its military and terror infrastructure. But if the war subsequently goes badly and/or gas prices continue to spike until the midterm elections in November, the political fallout could help defeat the Republicans. Truth be told, it was already something of a coin flip between the two parties.
Undoubtedly, Carlson and company would blame the war and Israel for such a defeat, lending some steam to an insurgency that could well wash over into the 2028 presidential election cycle.
The political equation
But
until proven otherwise, the groyper wing of the GOP remains largely a
function of the internet and social media, rather than an actual
electoral movement with grassroots activists.
It’s not just that Trump is likely to remain a dominant figure in the party, even as he heads into the last years of his presidency with, as he has repeatedly shown, the ability to wreck the careers of his GOP critics. That has been illustrated by Greene’s resignation from Congress, rather than hanging on to face inevitable defeat at the hands of a Trump-endorsed primary opponent.
Democratic primaries have been a mixed bag for traditional supporters of Israel this year, with even clearly antisemitic figures like Maine’s Graham Platner, who has a double-digit lead over Gov. Janet Mills, emerging as one of his party’s new stars.
Unlike the situation in the Democratic Party, where pro-Israel figures have become not merely a minority but actual outliers, the GOP caucuses in the House and Senate remain nearly unanimous in their support for the Jewish state. And there’s little evidence of anti-Israel candidates in the mold of Carlson or the groypers seeking to oust pro-Israel Republicans, let alone a protest movement against Trump.
Indeed, the groyper rebellion is very bad news for Carlson’s friend Vance. The vice president still holds a huge lead in the early polling for the 2028 Republican nomination. But his disappearing act since the war began and the president’s apparent recent preference for U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio bode ill for the vice president’s ability to remain the frontrunner in the two years until the voting begins.
If Vance remains low-key or invisible when it comes to support for the administration’s decision to go to war while his allies descend down a rabbit hole of opposition to Trump and antisemitism, there will be consequences. It will make it less likely that he will be in a position to claim the president’s endorsement in 2028—and that of Trump’s followers—or succeed him as commander in chief.
A blunder, not an opening
Contrary
to the hopes of left-wing and far-right Trump critics, what we are
seeing isn’t a widening GOP schism. Far from signaling a sea change on
the right, the decision of Carlson to challenge a president with a
devoted following that dwarfs his fan base was a blunder, not a
political opening.
Carlson’s ability to inject his poisonous views into the country’s discourse is real. Still, there is a difference between internet popularity and a viable electoral coalition, even within a political party. Those who tune in to his show—or to that of other antisemitic and antisemitic-adjacent celebrities to hear them spin conspiracy theories—do so for entertainment more than political inspiration. In picking a fight with Trump over Iran and Israel, the podcaster isn’t as much on shaky ground with Republican voters as he is tilting at windmills.
In a party whose voters remain devoted to Trump, while still solidly supportive of Israel and opposed to Islamist regimes like Iran, vitriol against Jews may generate clicks, but not votes. Rather than demonstrating their ability to take over a party in much the same way that progressive Israel-bashers and antisemites did with the Democrats, the faction of right-wing Jew-haters led by Carlson is crashing into a political dead end.
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