The MAGA Civil War Over Israel and Iran
podcast bros vs fox news hoes
As Israel and Iran traded missile fire, I spent several days on the phone with MAGA staffers, writers, and influencers who were trying — earnestly and doggedly — to prevent the president from joining Israel’s offensive. They didn’t succeed. But the shape of the conflict revealed a great deal about the real fissures within the Trumpist political elite — and the (perverted) manner in which life-or-death decisions are made by this administration. As I write in my latest column:
For the time being, the open war within the MAGA coalition is subsiding. (It’s not quite a cease-fire, but a lowering of temperatures.) But almost everyone I spoke to in recent days agreed the contradictions revealed by the conflict remain unresolved. A younger cohort of MAGA activists, many of whom got jobs in the lower levels of the administration, have begun to seriously doubt the instinctual deference to Israeli prerogatives that reigns in official Washington. They speak openly of the existence of an “Israel lobby” perverting American priorities, using language once only found in leftist magazines and Noam Chomsky books. They perceive a silent caveat to America First — i.e., “Israel Firster” — that can’t be reconciled with foreign-policy realism or U.S. interests. Several young right-wingers pointed me to a clip, which circulated on X after the Iran strikes, of State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce referring to the U.S. as “the greatest country on Earth, next to Israel.”
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“It’s the battle of the Murdoch empire versus the podcast bros,” said the former administration official. “Whoever wins determines matters of war and peace. I wish it were different, but that’s the reality.” Whereas Fox News continues to provide a morphine drip of anti-Iran bellicosity to the older GOP cohort, the earbuds of junior Republican staffers are tuned into anti-interventionist — and increasingly Israel-skeptical — content from Carlson, Bannon, Kirk, and even the pipsqueak antisemite Nick Fuentes.
As the hawks regroup and Israel more or less announces its intention to continue “mowing the grass” in Iran, this conflict is sure to reemerge. It’s not a good thing that the relative likelihood of WWIII is contingent on the media diet of a mercurial octogenarian. But them’s the breaks. This is the world we’re living in.
What does seem clear is that the fissures within MAGA revealed by “the 12-Day War,” as Trump has cheerfully dubbed it, are not going away. And they will continue to be adjudicated by podcasters and cable-TV hosts — all for an audience of one: the most powerful idiot in world history.
