After over a decade of loyalty to President Donald Trump, most political analysts assumed his MAGA supporters would stick with him through just about anything. As he famously declared on the campaign trail in 2016, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters,” and for a long while, that seemed to be the case. But now, according to the New York Times, MAGA turmoil over Trump's alignment with Israel is shifting into a death spiral. Some of his followers back Israel, while others say it’s a betrayal of the “America First” values they demand from the president. The growing schism now threatens the movement that brought him to power in the first place, and has Republican insiders worried about their future.
While many far-right MAGA voters have long spoken conspiratorially about Israel, often in antisemitic terms, Trump’s decision to join Israel in launching a war against Iran has prompted anti-Israel backlash among Republicans on the widest scale yet. Arguably the best known of these is Tucker Carlson, a former Trump supporter who accuses Israel of pushing the U.S. into war, which he claims makes the president a “slave” to foreign actors.
Many of Trump's more ardent supporters see the threat and are acting to counter it.
“It’s like a psychosis. It’s literally a psychosis,” said far-right influencer Laura Loomer in reference to anti-Israel conservatives. “It really is Israel derangement syndrome.”
Long a prominent voice in the MAGA movement, Loomer garnered public notoriety last year during her vocal push for Trump to fire White House officials she deemed disloyal. Now, she is “emerging as one of the president’s most aggressive, pro-Israel enforcers,” engaging in dramatic online fights with former Trump supporters like Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, and former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, all of whom have become outspoken critics of the president’s close relationship with Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump has done little to dissuade the criticism. A longtime supporter of Israel, he backed the country during its destructive campaign against Gaza, has repeatedly praised Netanyahu’s leadership, and even called for him to be pardoned for charges of bribery and fraud he’s faced for the past six years.
But Trump’s voters from MAGA and the wider Republican party have tended to disagree.
“The war has added to a tectonic shift in public opinion on American foreign policy that began with the Gaza war — a bipartisan swing away from Israel,” explained the Times. “It is a change that has already divided Democrats and is now penetrating a Republican Party whose leaders, buoyed by Evangelical voters, long positioned it as pro-Israel.” However, “a Pew Research Center survey in March found that 57 percent of Republicans under 50 have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 50 percent last year and 35 percent in 2022, and about the same share as Americans overall. Among Republicans 50 and older, 75 percent still support Israel, a figure that has barely budged since 2022. The result is a contrast between the Trump administration’s Israel-aligned foreign policy and the trajectory of public opinion on the right.”
You can see this tension even within individual campaigns. James Fishback, a 31-year-old candidate for Florida governor, on one hand advocates for ideas that seem right at home in a Trump or Republican platform, saying that Americans should accept “several mass shootings a year” as the cost of their gun rights, and calling the H-1B skilled worker visa program a “scam” that should end. But at the same time, his campaign sells t-shirts that declare, “No American should die for Israel,” which he says sell “very well with the younger crowd.”
While Fishback is only seeing single digits in primary polls, his anti-Israel messaging has found a home in the right.
“In Monticello,” wrote the Times, “Mr. Fishback drew applause when he promised to pardon a Florida International University student arrested after what her supporters said was a joke about Mr. Netanyahu bombing a university event. Answering a question about traffic cameras, Mr. Fishback ended with warning of a future in which government surveillance ‘has flagged you for making an antisemitic remark in the park.’ He said Florida should divest from its Israeli bonds because taxpayer money should not ‘be sent to any foreign country.’”
“That’s not antisemitism,” said Fishback. “That is just calling it as it is.”
While older audience members told the New York Times that they were put off by his statements on Israel, younger attendees, “mostly men,” said they came to see him speak specifically for his criticisms of Israel and the war. It resonated strongly with Trump supporters disappointed by his alliance with Israel.
“We thought it was going to be America First,” said Chris Lahey, 39, a nurse paramedic. “He turned on everybody, he turned on his voters” in favor of a “foreign power.”
Fishback and Loomer frequently trade barbs via social media, firmly representing two sides of the MAGA split over Israel. While the former has suggested that Loomer’s attacks on those critical of Israel could “destroy the Republican party,” she has argued that figures like Fishback and Carlson will “suppress Republican turnout enough to bring about Democratic control of Congress, Mr. Trump’s re-impeachment and ‘the ultimate communist Islamic takeover of America.’”