Donald Trump’s decision to join Israel’s attack against Iran has many of his MAGA coalition questioning the wisdom of decades of military support for the longtime U.S. ally.
A diverse coalition of MAGA influencers, podcast bros, think tankers and members of Congress who helped propel Trump to victory in 2024 have spoken out in recent days not only against the war, but against the very idea of American backing of Israel.
The opposition to support for Israel may be limited to a small section of the MAGA coalition for now, but it also happens to be the loudest.
Among the critics are Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon in the MAGA media space, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie in Congress, and extends into the podcast brosphere like Theo Von and Tim Dillon, both of whom are considered to be sympathetic to Trump.
Carlson has long been critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, but that criticism jumped up several gears since Israel attacked Iran on June 13. He wrote in a newsletter on the day before the first Israeli strikes that the U.S. should “drop Israel” and “let them fight their own wars.”
When Israeli strikes began and Trump was considering whether the U.S. should join the fight to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Carlson took Republican senator Ted Cruz to task in a viral interview on his support for Israel and the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — a bipartisan political action committee that promotes the U.S.-Israeli alliance.
“I don’t understand why we don’t just be honest and say they’re lobbying on behalf of a foreign government,” he said to Cruz, one of the most outspoken supporters of Israel in Congress.
Bannon, a former Trump administration figure and now popular MAGA influencer, seethed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a broadcast of his “War Room” on Tuesday after a tentative ceasefire brokered by Trump was almost undone.
“I think if you're going to continue on and continue to give the money and support and put people in harm's way — particularly this thing right now, it's every minute that President Trump's got to do something — we need to take a hard look, and I mean a very hard look, of exactly if they're supposed to be allies,” he said.
“We don't really have an alliance or a special relationship. The relationship does not feel very special, particularly for the non-interventionist, in particular, non-interventionist that supports Israel, as we do. It doesn't look right. It doesn't feel right. And the reason is, it ain't right,” he continued.
The sentiment from MAGA media is echoed in the halls of Congress.
Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman from Georgia and an ally of Trump’s, also has a recent history of rejecting U.S. support for Israel in her votes.
The day after the U.S. strikes on Iran, she issued rare criticism of the president in a lengthy post on X that called for an end to support for Israeli wars.
“I can easily say I support nuclear armed Israel’s right to defend themselves and also say at the same time I don’t want to fight or fund nuclear armed Israel’s wars,” she wrote.
She added that because of U.S. involvement in the attack, “Americans now fear Iranian terrorists attacks on our own soil and being dragged into another war by Netanyahu when we weren’t even thinking about any of this a week ago.”
These kinds of questions are typically a debate reserved for progressives in the Democratic Party, which has seen a dramatic decline in support for the U.S. ally that has sped up over the past year and a half as the war in Gaza has worsened.
Just 12 percent of Democrats said their sympathies lay more with Israelis, while 60 per cent sympathized more with Palestinians, according to a new poll released this month by Quinnipiac University. Last year, 30 percent of Democrats said they sympathized more with Israelis.
But Republican voters, and presidents, have traditionally been staunch supporters of Israel and of U.S. military and financial support, which amounts to some $4 billion a year, in addition to billions of dollars in sales of military equipment.
Cracks are now beginning to show in that support, too. The same Quinnipiac poll found that sympathy for Israelis dropped 14 percent among Republicans over the last year, from 78 percent last year to 64 per cent today.
A Gallup survey taken in March this year found only 46 percent of Americans expressed support for Israel, the lowest level in 25 years of Gallup's annual tracking. Some 33 percent now said they sympathized with the Palestinians — the highest ever reading of that measure.
Perhaps more worryingly for supporters of the U.S.-Israel alliance, doubts about the value of the relationship have broken out from the purely political parts of the Trump coalition and into MAGA-adjacent podcast bro arena.
Theo Von, a comedian who hosted Trump on his podcast during the 2024 campaign and was credited for introducing the then-candidate to younger male voters, has started publicly questioning the administration’s support.
“I felt like it was supposed to be America first, we’re focusing on: ‘What are we doing to get things back into America,’ right?” Von said during an interview with Democrat Ro Khanna. “Now, it feels like we are just working for Israel.”
The topic of U.S. support for Israel has become a frequent topic on his podcast. In another interview with Rep. Massie, also a critic of the alliance, the two questioned the influence of AIPAC before Von asked: “What do we get from Israel?”
"We get a lot of countries that hate us,” Massie replied.
Influencer Dillon, who hosted JD Vance during the 2024 campaign, has also been heavily critical of continued U.S. backing of Israel, particularly in light of the arrest and deportation of pro-Palestinian students.
“Is this being done for America, for Israel? I mean, this is a fair question. Is the United States government now just taking edicts and orders from Israel? Is this what people voted for when they elected Trump? To have a country taking orders from Israel? I don't think so,” he said on his podcast in reaction to the arrest of Rumeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, in March.
It remains to be seen if the MAGA influencers speaking out against Israel will have any lasting impression on Trump or the wider Republican party in Congress.
But Trump himself has been unusually candid in revealing his frustrations with Israel in recent days.
Speaking on the South Lawn of the White House just hours after Israel and Iran had each violated a ceasefire he had just proudly declared on social media, he criticized both countries “for so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*** they’re doing”.
“I’m not happy with Israel. When I say, ‘OK, now you have 12 hours’, you don’t go out in the first hour and just drop everything you have on [Iran]. So I’m not happy with them,” he told the reporters, growing visibly more agitated.
“I am really unhappy if Israel is going out this morning because of one rocket that didn’t land, that was perhaps fired by mistake – I’m not happy about that.”
Reacting to the tirade, Barbara Leaf, who served as the US’s assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs until earlier this year, told The Independent: “It's pretty extraordinary to have the president essentially loudly chiding the Israelis ... to stand down and not go on bombing.”
