The American-Israeli war with Iran is a domestic football in the Republican game of thrones. The outcome of the war, militarily and economically, will shape the outcome of the struggle for the 2028 Republican nomination. It will also be critical for the future of Jewish Americans.
Donald Trump is not Cyrus the Great. He is no different to any other American president in his second term. The closer he gets to the end of year four, the quicker the world’s most powerful man is eclipsed by the succession question.
The competition for the crown is especially vicious because Trump won it by being many thing to many factions, including Evangelicals, free marketeers, Hispanic small business owners, parents alarmed by trans ideology in preschools, and even conservative intellectuals.
As time pulls that coalition apart, it becomes obvious that there never was Trumpism. There is only Donald Trump. There is no Make America Great Again movement, only a loose association of populist impulses in the Republican base. And “America First” can mean anything to anyone.
The struggle over Trump’s legacy has polarised around a small faction around JD Vance, the two-year senator who, as Vice President, holds the job that John Nance Garner, FDR’s vice president, called “not worth a bucket of warm spit”; and a larger faction around Marco Rubio, the experienced three-term senator who, as Trump’s Secretary of State, has ridden herd on the historically liberal State Department.
Rubio is the continuity candidate, a skilled manager who might convince older voters that the old country-club Republican Party can be reconciled with its unhinged post-Trump mutation. Vance stands for the younger New Right alignment, which is more online, and hence irony-poisoned and more extreme, and for the Catholic-tinged “post-liberal” intellectual movement.
A civil war takes time to get going, but once the shooting starts, it’s hard to stop. The war for control over the Republican Party’s brain and body, the Washington think tanks and the MAGA movement, is well under way.
The MAGA civil war did not break out last November when Tucker Carlson gave a simpering, soft-soap interview to Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes and Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, DC’s biggest conservative think tank, initially refused to exclude Fuentes from future debates while Vice President JD Vance backed Carlson.
The struggle first came into the open in June 2025, when Donald Trump tipped the scales of the first round of the Israeli-Iranian war by launching Operation Midnight Hammer on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
Trump won in 2016 as the anti-interventionist who would end “forever wars” in the Middle East. He won again in 2024 on his record as the first modern president not to have started a war. Yet somehow, he ended up intervening in Iran, the graveyard of presidential reputations.
The current hostilities in Washington, DC are the third round of the war for the 2028 presidential nomination. As we’d expect, the truth about the current American-Israeli war with Iran is its first casualty. But the America-Israel relationship is in the crosshairs too.
Israel and the role of Jews in American politics were always a fault line on the American Right. But the isolationists, racists and fruitcakes were pushed to the fringes in the early 1960s. They regained influence in the Republican Party in the early 2000s for the same reason that they returned to influence in the Democratic Party.
The internet destabilised political authority. The body bags and failures of the War on Terror, and the gutting of small town America by globalisation, discredited the moderates of both parties.
The “Uniparty” wrought disaster on Middle America. Someone is to blame. But while the Democratic Party is wholly captured by its radicals, the Republicans aren’t – at least, not yet.
Never before have we seen so concerted an effort to declare a war lost before it has started. A global influence campaign, emanating from America’s enemies and exploited for partisan motives, is being used to split the US-Israel alliance, and shove Trump aside.
It’s also preparing to scapegoat Israel and Jewish Americans if the war goes badly. This is an American “Dolchstosslegende”, the myth that claimed Germany lost the First World War through a “stab in the back”.
The polls are all over the place. Is the MAGA base still all-in behind Trump, or has he lost the red caps to the racists and isolationists?
Everything depends on how the war goes. If Trump sideswipes China by flipping Iran back into the Western camp, the base will cheer. JD Vance, who’s kept a low profile, will look like a faintheart and Tucker Carlson will look like a foreign influence agent. Marco Rubio, who led the charge, comes out ahead.
Americans are practical people when they’re not being crazy. They’ll judge the war on its results and vote accordingly. If the war goes badly – if Iran retains the terrorist’s veto over the Gulf and the global economy crashes – then Tucker Carlson wins and JD Vance will say he told us so.
Add a recession and a spike in the price at the pumps, and the Republicans’ small but digitally loud anti-Israel faction will have a crisis that might allow them to send the Republicans the way of the Democrats.
The consequences for the America-Israel alliance, and for an American Jewish community already beset by incitement and violence, would be disastrous.
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