Aug 7, 2025

Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your daily politics dispatch. I’m Julia Ioffe, and it’s foreign policy Thursday.

Tonight, I explore whether MAGA is drifting into territory most recently occupied by the left: questioning why America continues to underwrite Israel’s war in Gaza. It’s the latest rupture in a once inviolable relationship entwining neocons, nationalists, and evangelicals, who are discovering that their interests might diverge in the Middle East.

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But first, here’s Abby Livingston…

Abby Livingston

Texas scold ’em: A sense of foreboding has fallen over Texas political circles, as everyone braces for the next turn in the redistricting fight. Based on the rhetoric from Gov. Greg Abbott, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, it seems increasingly likely that Texas Democratic legislators may face legal repercussions at some point for fleeing the state. How will the American public, not to mention the courts, respond to images of Democrats being marched to the state capitol in zip ties? “We’re in that moment when you put the Mentos in the Diet Coke bottle, and we are all waiting for it to explode,” a dazed Texas Republican told me.

Until then, Texas Democrats’ goal is to give California Democrats time to begin unwinding the Golden State’s anti-gerrymandering laws. Sources from both parties anticipate that a ballot initiative campaign—which will cover some of the most expensive TV markets in the country—will likely cost nine figures. That’s a lot of money for a fight that nobody wanted to have. A Republican operative with California clients made the same head-shaking argument that Democrats have made about Texas: Democrats may be pushing the limits of how many seats California can realistically deliver, given that the current delegation makeup is already so lopsided in favor of Democrats (43-9).
A staggering cycle: Operatives from both parties anticipate that more candidates will announce runs for office well into the fall, and possibly as late as winter. This means another unwritten rule of politics may be falling by the wayside: In the Before Times, candidates mostly rolled out their House and Senate campaigns at the beginning of the second and third quarters of the off-year. This cadence gave a candidate as much time as possible to stockpile fundraising for the general election. Even better, announcing early in a quarter offered the candidate a full four months to establish fundraising credibility before they filed their initial quarterly campaign finance report.

But in a sign of changing times, announcements have been far more staggered this cycle: Instead of waiting until the full quarter to show off fundraising prowess, a candidate might instead boast about their first day or week of fundraising—$100,000 raised in 24 hours for a House candidate, say, or if you’re Roy Cooper, $3.4 million in your Senate campaign’s first 24 hours. By the old rules, the next obvious time for candidates to announce would be early October. But my sense is that we will see more rollouts much earlier, sometime after Labor Day.

And now, the main event…

The Coming MAGA Israel Battle

Like the Democrats before them, the empowered MAGA movement finds itself fighting over U.S. support for Israel, with some of its loudest voices questioning a once sacrosanct relationship.

Julia Ioffe

Last month, a young man sitting in a political focus group told the group’s moderator that he was “upset” about the $4 billion in military aid that the U.S. deploys annually to Israel. “The amount, since 1948, amounts to $319 billion, adjusted to inflation,” he said. “I can think of multiple things at home that would have been a better allocation for our taxpayer dollars. … I think this money would have been better spent … helping our generation buy homes, rather than military strikes for Israel.”

This guy wasn’t wearing a keffiyeh or protesting on an Ivy League campus. He was wearing a cross and participating in a youth conservative leadership conference in Tampa hosted by Charlie Kirk, the right-wing MAGA influencer and close ally of Donald Trump. In fact, he was a chapter leader of Kirk’s grassroots organization, Turning Point USA.

The focus group was held on the conference’s sidelines, in part to manage the fallout from Tucker Carlson’s onstage rant, earlier in the programming, about his belief that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad spy who had been helping the government of Israel run a criminal blackmail scheme in the United States. Carlson was being dismissed as antisemitic for his critical commentary, but the young man and others disagreed, expressing vocal frustration that Israel had bombed Iran while the U.S. was in the middle of negotiations with them, and that the U.S. was sending Israel so much money. Even Kirk—who talks frequently about his admiration for Israel, and about his travels to see where Jesus rose from the dead and walked on water—agreed with the sentiment. “I love Israel,” said the 31-year-old. “But I’m an American. And I represent a generation that can’t afford anything. If you call everyone an antisemite because they don’t accept a puritanical view of the Netanyahu government—that’s bad for everyone.”

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The Carlson tirade, and the results of Kirk’s focus group, were a microcosm of a larger phenomenon on the right: a growing willingness, especially among Gen Z, to question what they see as America’s willingness to unequivocally support and bankroll a foreign government. That sentiment has also been accompanied by a profound irritation that their questions are being dismissed out of hand as Jew-hatred. As Kirk said before wrapping up the proceedings: “There’s an earthquake coming on this issue.”

The Horseshoe Becomes a Circle

It is a truism of the Trump era that this president has scrambled traditional political alliances—note former far-left Dems R.F.K. Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard serving in his cabinet—and bent the political horseshoe. The issue of America’s allegiance with Israel is, in some ways, just part of that story. What was once a bedrock of bipartisan foreign-policy consensus is now an issue facing political pressure from both sides—and one where the far ends of both parties find themselves agreeing on a surprising amount.

During the first 18 months following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, it was mostly the left that battled the Democratic Party’s pro-Israel institutional core. Republicans stood off to the side, high on schadenfreude, as progressives asked why the Biden administration was financing Israel’s war of retaliation in Gaza and making itself complicit in potential war crimes and genocide. The protests against Israel on U.S. college campuses, which often veered into antisemitism, terrified many Jews across the country, and Trump and the Republicans were more than happy to embrace them. And while Jews still overwhelmingly voted for Harris in 2024, there was significant erosion of Jewish support for the Democrats—something many attributed to the feeling that progressives had abandoned not just Israel, but also American Jews.

But power is a funny thing: Now that MAGA is running the show, the Republicans find themselves responsible for similar policies, and riven by similar debates, which popped up in Carlson’s rhetoric and Kirk’s sidebar: Why is America sending so much money to Israel? Why can’t we criticize a foreign government without being labeled antisemites?

There are differences, of course. On the right, the frustration tends to be about isolationism and not spending money on wars in the Middle East—and generally not about rejecting the idea of a Jewish state. Most of the young people in Kirk’s focus group, for instance, were careful to preface their criticism by saying that they believe in Israel’s “right to exist” and “right to defend itself.” Carlson, even while peddling conspiracy theories about the Jewish state manipulating the U.S. government through Epstein’s trafficking in minors, said that he loves Israel and has taken his family on vacation there.

You won’t hear that on the progressive left, where the criticism tends to be about U.S. bombs killing Palestinians, along with questions of human rights, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and what it means to support a state where one ethnic group enjoys, at best, second-class citizenship. But you also won’t hear progressives veering into outright Islamophobia, as when Kirk said he prefers to have the Christian holy sites not be in Muslim hands. (“We don’t want a bunch of Muslims taking this place over, like they did with Bethlehem,” Kirk said.) Kirk has also said that he wants all Jews to convert to Christianity.

But in many instances, the political horseshoe has fully collapsed into a circle. Witness, for example, Jewish space laser theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene decrying the genocide in Gaza and voting “present” alongside Rashida Tlaib, the lone Palestinian-American in Congress, on a resolution condemning antisemitism. Or Tucker Carlson hosting John Mearsheimer, the Israel Lobby author and Bernie Sanders fan, for a podcast episode in which the two agreed on almost everything for two hours. Or Megyn Kelly inviting Kirk onto her podcast to complain about how “irritating” it is to be called an antisemite for criticizing Israeli policies. (It’s also worth noting that many of the Trump allies who are now questioning Israel and expressing frustration at being called antisemites also support the president’s crackdown on liberal universities under the guise of battling antisemitism. Turns out that “legitimate criticism” of Israel is in the eye of the beholder.)

Fissures are appearing in more unexpected places, too. Last month, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian and supporter of Israeli settlements, visited a Christian village in the West Bank that had been attacked by Israeli settlers. He had come, he said, to “express solidarity with the people who just want to live their lives in peace, to be able to go to their own land, to be able to go to their place of worship.” Just a few days earlier, Saif Musallet, a Palestinian-American from Tampa, was beaten to death by Israeli settlers when he was visiting family in the West Bank. Huckabee condemned his killing as a “criminal and terrorist act” and said he had “asked Israel to aggressively investigate the murder,” adding that “Saif was just 20 yrs old.”

Huckabee apparently didn’t mind the settlements when their residents were attacking Muslim Palestinians who didn’t have U.S. citizenship, but he had never condemned such attacks before at all. I imagine that seeing the increasingly brutal and violent settler activity in the West Bank closer up, as ambassador to Israel, has a way of challenging one’s views.

“A Fight Within the Family”

When I called the Republican Jewish Coalition, they were at pains to make clear that not everyone was the same in this “fight within the family.” “Charlie’s been very good on this, he’s been a very good ally,” said Sam Markstein, R.J.C.’s national political director. Greene wasn’t. In fact, the R.J.C. has backed primary challenges against her twice. I asked Markstein whether the Georgia congresswoman was an antisemite. “I don’t know what’s in her heart, but she’s certainly trafficked in antisemitic stereotypes for a while.” How about Tucker’s views on Israel? “We think it’s problematic, and we’re going to have that battle,” Markstein promised. “If you don’t believe that Israel is an ally, you’re going to have to go through the R.J.C. first.”

Markstein then pointed to polling that showed robust and rising support for Israel, and its war in Gaza, among Republicans, as well as near-unanimous support from “MAGA conservatives” for America joining Israel’s bombing campaign against Iran. “The MAGA base is a far more pro-Israel and far more pro-Jewish community than even regular conservatives,” he said.

Moreover, Markstein contended that Trump, as the person who invented MAGA, is the one who decides what MAGA stands for—and right now, Trump is standing with Israel. “In the end, he’s leading the movement and his credentials are unimpeachable,” he told me.

But Markstein may be too sanguine about the political realignment taking place. Despite the explicit, decade-long political alliance that began when Netanyahu openly courted Republicans, in 2015, as a result of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, the war in Gaza has exacerbated fissures between the right-wing Likud government and the right-wing Trump base. Even Trump himself has started to show daylight with Netanyahu, directly contradicting the latter’s claims that there is no starvation in Gaza.

And for all Markstein’s conviction that Trump’s loyalty to Israel is ironclad, a newer, more Israel-skeptical generation is coming of age, and not just on the left. They don’t see why the exact same grievance Trump has repeatedly articulated—that the U.S. is constantly getting ripped off by its allies—shouldn’t apply to Israel as well. In the long run, even if he does manage to keep Trump on side, Netanyahu may alienate both parties. And that will continue to be a problem for Israel long after he’s gone.

That’s all from me, friends. I’ll see you back here next week. Until then, good night. Tomorrow will be worse.

Julia

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