The Anti-Israel Woke-Right Lost Trump

Who is losing the most in the successful strikes on Iran by the Israeli Defense Forces? At the top of the list is, obviously, the Islamist regime itself. It has had its terrorist infrastructure in the form of the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as what is left of its military. And, of course, it has suffered significant damage to its nuclear facilities, in addition to its oil and gas industry, which is the foundation of the despotic government’s already-shaky economy.

We don’t know yet what this will mean for the future of the theocratic regime that has maintained power since it took over the country in 1979. And it’s still far from clear whether the credibility lost by the way that the Israeli Air Force has been able to operate with impunity, destroying the government’s assets and leaders, will be enough to shake off their tyrannical grip on a nation that desperately needs to replace them.

The other big loser in this struggle is a “woke right” faction of the conservative movement in the United States that opposes Israel and has been fervently opposed to any action to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons. More to the point, this rag-tag group of talk-show hosts, right-wing influencers and social-media gurus who can’t seem to mention Israel without betraying their antisemitic tendencies has lost President Donald Trump.

Or to be more precise, they never really had him.

The Tucker Carlson factor

The most prominent of these voices on the right is former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose shows and posts on the X platform reach many millions of people. As I’ve noted previously, Carlson is adamant about his distaste for Israel and his willingness to shill for the Iranian regime as well as its ally Qatar.

But he’s just the most well-known and loudest of a group of people who have utilized the Internet to create the impression that Trump’s voters share their views about foreign policy—most specifically, when it comes to Israel and Iran. What they have failed to understand is that their soft spot for Tehran—a government that has never wavered from its belief that America was the “Great Satan” with whom they were locked in perpetual conflict—had nothing to do with what Trump has dubbed his “America First” foreign policy.

As polls have consistently shown, Republicans and conservatives overwhelmingly support Israel, even as Democrats and the political left have abandoned it. Yet Carlson and his woke right acolytes, imitators and supporters are certain that Trump will lose his MAGA supporters if he continues to support Israel and doesn’t pursue a policy of appeasing Iran. However, as Trump said in an interview in The Atlantic, he’s the one who decides how to define “America First,” not Carlson and the trolls he platforms or plays to via the Internet.

Their confusion stems from their conviction that Trump’s determination not to commit America to more failed wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan meant that he had no interest in supporting Israel’s defense or was willing to let a nation like Iran acquire the ability to intimidate or destroy the Jewish state, as well as Arab allies like Saudi Arabia.

It’s true that Trump chose not to join Israel’s effort to decapitate the Iranian regime and its nuclear facilities. And his futile negotiations with the rogue regime to get it to give up its nuclear ambitions, led by his clueless Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, may have given both Tehran and some on the American far right the impression that in his second term, Trump would be channeling the foreign policy of former president Barack Obama.

Trump’s actions are what matter

Even if those negotiations weren’t part of some elaborate feint to lull the Iranians into a sense of complacency about their security and the strength of their diplomatic position, as the Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran thinks is possible, Trump’s position on Israel’s Iran offensive is a grave disappointment to woke right pundits and posters.

Future historians will have to unravel the minute-by-minute process by which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informed Trump of intentions to attack Iran. We know that the president was publicly saying that he wanted negotiations, which had already reached an impasse, to continue, and that he didn’t want the Israelis to strike. Yet the Israelis went ahead with it anyway.

Some critics of Trump and Israel, on both the left and the right, are claiming that this illustrated the administration’s weakness as well as demonstrated that their conspiratorial fantasies about the Jews running American foreign policy were true.

Yet had he wanted to, Trump could have stopped the Israelis or at least distanced the United States from the war in a tangible manner that would have severely impacted Jerusalem’s decision-making process.

That is, after all, exactly what previous presidents, including Obama and Joe Biden, had done when they repeatedly forbade the Israelis from striking Iran. He could have, as Biden or whoever was actually running foreign policy from 2021 to 2025 did, threatened to stop the resupply of arms and ammunition needed to fight Hamas in Gaza since the start of the war, the Palestinians and their Iranian backers began with the Hamas atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Trump could have threatened not to help defend Israel from Iranian missile attacks. And he could have publicly disavowed the Israeli offensive by condemning it. Yet although that’s what Carlson wanted, the president did none of that.

Instead, he subsequently pronounced the Israeli attacks as “excellent,” telling the world that he had known “everything” about them in advance and warned of “more to come” if the Iranians did come to heel.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others in the administration made it clear that Washington was not participating in the fighting. But the continued American involvement in Israel’s defense against Iran’s indiscriminate firing of missiles and drones aimed at civilians in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem—Jews, Arabs, Christians and others—shows that the two allies are still closely cooperating in this struggle against a common foe.

He meant what he said

The point is that Trump meant what he said about not wanting to mire the United States in more “forever” wars based on the dubious prospects of “nation-building” aimed at transforming Islamic countries into Western-style democracies. He also meant what he said about never allowing Iran to get a nuclear weapon—something that Obama and Biden’s policies, cheered on by feckless European allies and domestic leftist and far-right factions that hate Israel, would have guaranteed in the long run. Trump fancies himself a great dealmaker and peacemaker, and his success in brokering the Abraham Accords in his first term gives him reason for doing so. Still, he also doesn’t want to repeat Obama and Biden’s mistakes in appeasing Iran. His backing for Israel’s efforts, couched though they were with calls for Iran to rejoin his nuclear talks, was the opposite of the anti-Israel crowd’s definition of “America First.”

Supporters and foes of Israel are expending enormous energy trying to interpret his every statement about the current war, in which at one moment, he cheers on the Israelis, and then expresses his desire for the war to end and for Jerusalem and Tehran to make a deal.

More consistency in his communications would be preferable. But that isn’t how Trump operates. As with most such efforts to monitor his daily flow of statements and social-media postings on a host of issues, this is a fool’s errand. Trump’s stand on the war against Iran is not a matter of interpretation. Had he been determined to stop it, he could have done so or imposed penalties on Israel in such a way as to make its continuation difficult, if not impossible.

Unlike the liberal foreign-policy establishment or America’s European allies, who have no appetite for confronting the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism that believes itself engaged in an Islamic “forever war” to destroy the West, Trump understands that such threats cannot be appeased. It’s true that he’d prefer that Middle East policy be a function of trade deals rather than security crises. Yet he neither shares the Obama vision of a rapprochement with Iran in which it would replace Israel and Saudi Arabia as the lynchpin of American ties to the region nor believes in the fairy tale about the mullahs wanting to “get right with the world,” as the 44th president did.

If he wants improved relations with Iran, it is now apparent that it will only be on his terms, which would involve nuclear concessions that Tehran won’t concede without compromising the regime’s basic purpose of a never-ending war on the West and Israel.

Those expecting Trump to force Israel to “restrain” itself and end the war prematurely are likely to be as disappointed as those, like Carlson, who want Washington to end the alliance with Jerusalem. Like most Americans, Trump wants a non-nuclear Iran and admires the ingenuity, brilliance and daring of the IDF’s operations, while believing that this is a job that the Israelis ought to do themselves, albeit with U.S. assistance.

Restraint in resisting Iran and an unwillingness to understand the threat to the West posed by a terrorist regime is what brought the world to this point. The effort to prevent Israel from achieving its goal of doing irreparable damage to the Iranian nuclear and ballistic-missile programs is the true threat to peace at the moment. The accusation that Israel “started” this conflict is a lie since Iran has been engaged in fomenting a seven-front war against the Jewish state via its terrorist proxies long before the events of Oct. 7.

Whatever the ultimate outcome of this campaign turns out to be, the notion that Trump was an isolationist who would betray Israel—as those on the left and the woke right want the United States to do—has proved to be an antisemitic pipe dream. Tucker Carlson and his crowd had no influence on the first Trump administration’s historic pro-Israel policies. And, much to their consternation, they are having just as little impact on those of his second.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate.