Podcaster Megyn Kelly and Fox News host Mark Levin are two of the country’s best-known conservative influencers. She opposes the war in Iran. He supports it.

Kelly, a former Fox News host, recently argued that the war was sold to the American people by “Israel firsters like Mark Levin.” He called her an “emotionally unhinged, lewd and petulant wreck.” It only got uglier from there.

As the joint U.S.-Israeli military action against Iran rolls into its third week, leading figures of the MAGA movement have attacked one another with increasing vehemence over the wisdom of the war and, more broadly, what America’s relationship to the Jewish state should be.

The debate reflects a widening rift within the American conservative movement. For decades, conservatives were stalwart supporters of the Jewish state, but over the last few years, some have grown disenchanted with Israel and its role in American politics. The disagreements have only intensified since the attacks began Feb. 28.

Donald Trump, a president uniquely solicitous of, and sensitive to, the right-wing media sphere, weighed in over the weekend on the dispute between Kelly and Levin, taking the latter’s side.

“Those that speak ill of Mark will quickly fall by the wayside,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social. Despite repeatedly pledging on the campaign trail to avoid foreign conflicts, he defended the current war as consistent with the precepts of his movement. “THEY ARE NOT MAGA, I AM,” he stated.

Politicians Join Trump’s Side

Joining Trump’s side of the debate are politicians like Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and media figures like Ben Shapiro, a prominent podcaster who has called those who oppose the attacks on Iran “cowards, liars and America haters.” Shapiro, who, like Levin, is Jewish, also singled out Kelly as an “unbelievable coward” for believing, as she said, that “no one should have to die for a foreign country.”

The critics have been equally withering. Tucker Carlson, the well-known podcaster, has been selling ball caps, T-shirts and coffee mugs emblazoned with messages like, “Neocons are Gay For Israel” and “AIPAC An Offer You Can’t Refuse,” crude and unsubtle attacks on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group, and other defenders of Israel.

Carlson has called the strikes “absolutely disgusting and evil” and said they occurred because “Israel wanted it to happen.”

Similar anti-Israel sentiments have been expressed by other far-right figures, including podcaster Alex Jones and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, as well as by more moderate voices like podcaster Joe Rogan and influential conservative intellectual and Trump critic Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan wrote last week that he believed the attack was essentially an Israel-first, rather than an America-first, proposition.

“In plain English,” Sullivan stated, “this is what is in front of our nose: a corrupt, deranged monarch pursuing an illegal and immoral war primarily to benefit a foreign country.”

White House officials contend that Trump’s base is with him on this war, citing recent polls showing that majorities of self-identified “MAGA Republicans” support it.

“Claims that the noble Operation Epic Fury will somehow fracture the president’s base are not backed by or reflected in the data,” said Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, in an email.

But the heated disagreement over attacking Iran, which shows no sign of abating, sets this conflict apart from previous military actions in Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq, which began with more unified support from conservatives.

Division Over Recent Attacks

The division has colored conversations about recent attacks, threats and vandalism within the United States since the war began. After a Lebanese immigrant attacked a Michigan synagogue last week, Laura Loomer, a pro-Israel right-wing influencer, posted that “Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens all have blood on their hands,” referring to Carlson and two antisemitic right-wing celebrities. “This is what they have been pushing for with their rhetoric and attacks on Jews.”

The internecine brawling could also inject an element of drama to the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference this month in Dallas. Planned speakers at the event include Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former Shah of Iran, who supports the military action, and Steve Bannon, a former Trump campaign manager and podcaster, who recently accused Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of tricking Trump into a “regime change” war.

It remains to be seen whether the war will have a lasting impact on American attitudes toward Israel. Polling shows that sizable support for Israel still exists but that it is eroding, especially among Republicans younger than 50. A March 2025 poll by Pew Research found that 50% of these younger Republicans had a negative view of Israel, compared with 35% in 2022. Republicans age 50 and older also had a more negative view of Israel, rising to 23% last year from 19% in 2022.

Overall, the 2025 poll found that 53% of Americans held a negative opinion of Israel, an increase of 11 percentage points compared with three years earlier.

“In general, there’s been a transformation, and that transformation has, you know, just shifted the way people see Israel and its role,” said Shibley Telhami, a politics professor at the University of Maryland who tracks American attitudes about Israel.

Critics of the war have seized on the March 2 comments by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who told reporters that the United States had initiated its attacks only after learning that Israel had already planned to strike. “We knew that would precipitate an attack on U.S. forces,” Rubio said. “If we didn’t preemptively strike before they launched those attacks, we would suffer more casualties.”

Although he tried to walk back the comments, critics widely interpreted them as an admission that the United States was acting at Israel’s behest rather than in pursuit of its own national interests.

“Rubio’s statement did nothing to disabuse the crazier conspiracy theorists from going down that rabbit hole,” said David Myers, a professor of Jewish history at UCLA. “It’s potentially really combustible.”

For now, it is difficult to know how the hostilities within the conservative movement, much like the war itself, will end, and what that end might look like. For conservatives like Laurie Cardoza Moore, an Israel supporter and critic of Carlson, the question could not be more serious.

“This is going to be the defining moment of the Republican Party, of the conservative movement,” she said.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Richard Fausset and Ken Bensinger/Jordan Gale
c. 2026 The New York Times Company