How the Fight Over Israel Is Playing Out Inside MAGA

 

How the Fight Over Israel Is Playing Out Inside MAGA

 

The war in Iran has added to a tectonic shift in public opinion — a bipartisan swing away from Israel. Some on the far-right are fighting to keep President Trump’s movement aligned with the Jewish state.

 

Laura Loomer, the far-right media figure, has emerged as one of the president’s most aggressive, pro-Israel enforcers.

 

Anton Troianovski

By Anton Troianovski

Reporting from Monticello and Pensacola, Fla.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/us/politics/israel-maga-republicans.html

May 6, 2026

 

On the campaign trail in Florida farm country, a long-shot Republican candidate for governor is selling $40 T-shirts that say “No American should die for Israel.”

 

A few hours west, Laura Loomer, the far-right media figure, is preparing a pitch to donors to help fund a new outlet: a weekly newsletter taking on the right-wing podcasters critical of Israel.

 

Rarely is foreign policy a major political issue in a midterm election year. But the war in Iran has helped turn the U.S. relationship with Israel into a marquee topic among Republicans, pushing allies of President Trump like Ms. Loomer to escalate their attacks on conservative critics of the relationship and creating new fault lines on America’s far right.

 

“It’s like a psychosis. It’s literally a psychosis,” Ms. Loomer said in an interview last week, referring to the turn against Israel among some conservatives. “It really is Israel derangement syndrome.”

 

Ms. Loomer, who gained prominence last year after pushing Mr. Trump to fire White House officials she deemed disloyal, is emerging as one of the president’s most aggressive, pro-Israel enforcers. Her attacks on what used to be her fellow allies of Mr. Trump are evidence of the urgency that some in the president’s camp — and supporters of a close relationship with Israel — see in seeking to blunt the influence of right-wing critics of the Jewish state.

 

On her X account with nearly two million followers, Ms. Loomer refers to Israel as “our greatest ally” and discloses purported personal details about prominent critics of Israel and Mr. Trump.

 

Ms. Loomer said she has been honing her pitch to donors as she has prepared to roll out her newsletter, The Loomer Rumor, which she said was meant to showcase her “opposition research” while targeting right-wing figures critical of Israel — a group that she calls the “Woke Reich.” Its best-known voice is Tucker Carlson, who has broken with Mr. Trump over the war in Iran. Mr. Carlson has accused Israel of pushing Mr. Trump into war, which he says makes the president a “slave” to foreign interests.

 

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. 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. And it is palpable even in Florida, where Ms. Loomer lives and support for Israel runs so deep that the legislature last year lifted credit-rating limits to allow local governments to buy more Israeli bonds.

 

“It’s been very shocking,” said Chase Tramont, a Republican member of the Florida House of Representatives. “You have so many younger folks on the right that are actually singing the same tune that the radical left is singing.”

 

Mr. Tramont, a pastor, described U.S. support for Israel as “grounded in historical precedent, biblical values and America First policies.” He introduced a bill last year to require Florida schools and state agencies to refer to the Israeli-occupied West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical names for the region that are widely used in Israel.

 

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But staunchly pro-Israel politicians like Mr. Tramont, 46, are starting to seem like a minority among younger Republicans. 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. The five-week bombing of Iran this year was the first time the United States and Israel launched and fought a war side by side. And yet in the podcast “manosphere” that widely endorsed Mr. Trump in 2024, the loudest voices are critics of Israel like Mr. Carlson.

 

“The great irony in this is that you have the U.S. and Israel jointly conducting a war,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a senior State Department official in the George W. Bush administration and a longtime proponent of a close relationship with Israel. “The thing that’s bizarre here is that the administration is not actually setting the tone in some ways.”

 

Mr. Cohen is among those who see the shift against Israel as driven, in part, by ingrained antisemitism. “There always was an anti-Israel and also antisemitic part of the Republican Party,” he said.

 

Mr. Carlson said on his show last week that for American politicians, “love for Israel is accompanied by contempt for the United States, maybe even hatred for the United States.” He rejects accusations of antisemitism, arguing that his critique of Israel is driven by his view of U.S. interests. In Florida, he has praised James Fishback, 31, as a Republican contender in the state governor’s race.

 

At a campaign stop last Wednesday in the small farming town of Monticello, outside Tallahassee, Mr. Fishback railed against gun laws and foreign workers. He said Americans should accept “several mass shootings a year” as the cost of their gun rights, and called the H-1B skilled worker visa program a “scam” that he would seek to end.

 

But the T-shirt he hawked at a coffee shop was the one saying that no American should die for Israel. Sean Lozano, the deputy campaign manager, said it was their best seller.

 

“It does very well with the younger crowd,” he said.

 

Mr. Fishback is in the single digits in primary polls and has faced accusations, which he denies, from a former fiancée who has said their relationship began while she was still a minor. But his ability to generate buzz among young people has shown how Israel has the potential to emerge as a campaign issue, especially amid evidence that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel helped pull Mr. Trump into the unpopular war on Iran.

 

In Monticello, 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,” Mr. Fishback said. “That is just calling it as it is.”

 

Several older people in the audience, who all declined to give their full names, said they were put off by Mr. Fishback’s fixation on Israel. One 70-year-old woman, who described herself as a born-again Christian, said that she loved Mr. Netanyahu and that the United States needed to walk hand in hand with Israel.

 

But many of the younger attendees, mostly men, said they had come to see Mr. Fishback because of his views on Israel and his opposition to the Iran war. A university student, Garrett Wilson, 20, said he broke with Mr. Trump’s foreign policy after the assassination of Charlie Kirk and referred to the false conspiracy theories that Israel may have had something to do with his death. (Mr. Fishback said those accusations were “unsubstantiated by the evidence.”)

 

“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.”

 

 

In an interview, Mr. Fishback said the attacks by Ms. Loomer on critics of Israel could “destroy the Republican Party.” Ms. Loomer said that figures like Mr. Fishback and Mr. Carlson could suppress Republican turnout enough to bring about Democratic control of Congress, Mr. Trump’s re-impeachment and “the ultimate communist Islamic takeover of America.”

 

But Ms. Loomer also acknowledged that the shift in public opinion would be hard to reverse. She said she had lost friends, like the former Trump aide Roger Stone, because of her support of Israel. She said she told Mr. Trump about two months ago, “You’re probably going to be the last pro-Israel president we ever have.”

 

“You’re right,” she said Mr. Trump responded. A White House spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, did not confirm that exchange, but said that Israel “has always been a great ally to the United States” and that its forces were “incredible partners” in the war on Iran.

 

Ms. Loomer said that Israel should recognize the reality of shifting public opinion and accept the elimination of U.S. military aid. Mr. Netanyahu himself has vowed to cut Israel’s reliance on such aid. The current 10-year U.S. aid package of $38 billion is set to expire in 2028.

 

“I don’t foresee the G.O.P. being as explicitly pro-Israel anymore,” Ms. Loomer said. “Whether the criticism is legitimate or not, or whether it’s foreign funded or not, it’s there. And perception is reality.”

 

Anton Troianovski writes about American foreign policy and national security for The Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Berlin.