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Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Georgia congressperson and former Trump megafan, has a theory for what the strikes against Iran mean for a new political reality. “And just like that we are no longer a nation divided by left and right,” she wrote on social media Monday, “we are now a nation divided be those who want to fight wars for Israel and those who just want peace and to be able to afford their bills and health insurance.” She had one major opposition figure in mind: Laura Loomer, the hard-right influencer who has established a close advisory position to Donald Trump.

“This bitch is celebrating the death of American military members and thanking their families for their blood sacrifice,” Greene wrote of Loomer. “But this is who Trump takes late night calls from and laps up her praise and worship. … And now Americans are once again coming home in flag draped coffins from another stupid pointless foreign war for foreign regime change on behalf of Israel.”

Loomer had similar feelings about Greene: “How much money are you making off of Muslims?” she asked on Sunday evening.

There’s something more remarkable here than just a spat between two influential conservative women: Their fight is just one in a sprawling ideological conflict playing out on social media, where different right-wing voices are, more than ever in recent memory, breaking with one another in open hostility. Pro-war and anti-war conservatives have been accusing each other of bigotry, idiocy, corruption, hidden ethno-religious agendas, and anti-Americanism. The conservative movement isn’t pretending to be one unified coalition under Trump anymore.

Instead, the strikes on Iran have caused the fractures within the alliance to expand to the point where it will be difficult, if not impossible, to reclose them—a major problem as Trump tries to keep his political coalition together.

On one side, media figures popular with the newer populist right, such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and even the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, are viewing the strikes as a betrayal of Trump’s promises of “America First” and as a capitulation to Israel. To the anti-war side, Trump’s actions in the region are not just a sign of Trump’s weakness in being swayed by another country’s interests, but of his surrender to the Deep State, the older institutional order that Trump had been elected to fight. On the other side, Republicans with more allegiance to the traditional conservative movement, such as Ben Shapiro and Ted Cruz, see the strikes as necessary for maintaining American security and fulfilling long-standing Republican goals.

These two versions of the right have had tensions before. But this fight is different. For most of Trump’s time in politics, there was a general unspoken rule that voters, politicians, and conservative media figures should stand behind the president no matter what, at least publicly. Some influencers are indeed trying to carry this tradition on, making the case for the Iran assault to fit with the “America First” agenda, even when their reasoning has seemed particularly contorted. The influencer Mike Cernovich, for example, argued that Trump would be successful where previous presidents failed because he would not pursue war in a “toxic feminine” or “compassionate conservative” way. (“We have never in our lifetime seen a war executed in the right wing masculine,” he said.) But this time, many of the most prominent conservative commentators felt emboldened enough to openly criticize the administration’s actions.

There are two political trends driving this newly critical stance. First, owing in part to the expensive and brutal war in Gaza, the American public is beginning to reassess the U.S.-Israel relationship. Given that Trump has long pledged to end wars, rather than start them, and given that American involvement in the conflict began during Joe Biden’s presidency, conservatives felt free to participate in those conversations, parallel to the left. But the second trend, which has infiltrated many of the larger conversations around Israel, is grounded in far uglier soil. Partially due to the nature of social media and the modern attention economy, openly antisemitic influencers such as Fuentes and Owens have grown wildly popular. To this element of the right, Israel is not just the focus of geopolitical opinions but conspiracy theories and aggressive bigotries.

Not every major conservative voice fits neatly into this new-versus-old, institutional-versus-isolationalist divide. There are those, such as Dan Bongino, with direct ties to the administration and incentives to maintain those relationships. There are MAGA trolls with underdeveloped policy views who are there only to joke about the next strikes targeting popular Democrats. There is also a large cohort of influencers who have hitched their own careers to Trump boosterism rather than any particular ideology.

But the most heated debate is still driven by the two major camps. The figures and feuds are too numerous to list, but they share a common intensity. They often mimic each other’s arguments, accusing one another of hatefulness or of abandoning their values. They fight over the memory of Charlie Kirk, insisting he would have either opposed or embraced war. The pro-Israel side, which includes many evangelical leaders and Fox News figures, thinks the opposition has been addled by internet conspiracy-theory thinking. The anti-Israel side, which includes highly popular independent show hosts such as Carlson and Megyn Kelly, argue that Trump has been duped by bloodthirsty elites indifferent to the American public’s interests. (Critics remain hesitant to criticize Trump the man, even as they blast the administration.)

Neither side has an absolute claim on morality or on intellectual consistency. The anti-Israel side does stand truer to the history of Trump’s official (though repeatedly ignored) “America first” policy on nonintervention. They can also seem at times to speak with reason and compassion after Israel commits war crimes; Greene, for example, responded to the reports of Iranian schoolgirls being killed in the strikes with moral outrage. “This is NOT freeing the Iranian people!!!” she wrote. “This is murdering their children!!! WTF are you insane people doing???” But their side is, indeed, riddled with vile antisemitism. Greene herself has boosted conspiracy theories about Jewish space lasers. Owens, who has nearly 6 million followers on YouTube, has framed the war as a sacrifice of “goyim” and spoken of Jewish “filth” trying to “collapse America.” She has also shared a tweet arguing that “Our country is controlled by Jewish pedophiles and this war is to distract from the Epstein coverup.” Another anti-Israel influencer, who was at the center of a related scandal after her appearance on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, called Israeli Jews “God’s enemies” instead of “God’s chosen people” in an X post about the airstrike that hit the girls’ elementary school. Loomer was not wrong when she complained that “there is a faction of the GOP that speaks like Nazis.”

The pro-Israel side, in contrast, seems to stand against the ugliest and most ridiculous elements of their party, rejecting the elements that embrace Holocaust denialism or believe Zionist forces run the United States or that Mossad conspired with Charlie Kirk’s wife and ancient Sumerian supertechnology to assassinate him. But they have their own ugliness, in the form of Islamophobic fearmongering: Loomer, for example, has responded to the strikes by arguing that “it’s time for President Trump to use the military and DHS to round up every single Islamic immigrant and non-citizen Muslim and mass deport them from America with force.” And on X, you can find countless examples of influencers on the pro-Israel side sharing views that directly contradict their statements from a year ago; they seem to stand as a direct indictment of Trumpism’s intellectual shallowness, of moving shamelessly with the political winds.

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With rhetoric this charged, it’s hard to see how these two factions will be able to reunite peaceably. And it’s clear that the administration is starting to grow concerned about this conflict. On Monday, after right-wing commentator Matt Walsh wrote to express his displeasure with the lack of a solid justification from the Trump administration, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt put out a direct response to Walsh’s X post, laying out the administration’s argument. Later, when the journalist Rachael Bade spoke with Trump, he criticized Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, arguing that they were not MAGA, that “MAGA is Trump” and “loves what I’m doing.”

The administration has reason for concern. Early polling has shown that these strikes aren’t popular among Republicans. We’re in a midterm year, as some right-wing commentators have noted with alarm. The GOP needs its influencers to reassure the MAGA faithful, rather than stoke dissent. There’s a long history of predicting voters will turn on Trump, and it seldom sticks. It’s possible that the MAGA faithful—both high-profile influencers and rank-and-file voters—will come home to Trump soon. But at this moment, the ties that bind Trump to some of his most steadfast supporters are stretched more thin than ever. And that in itself makes this a remarkable moment.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene

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