How Netanyahu’s MAGA Evangelical Backers Are Grappling With Backlash Against Him

In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Following his attendance at the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and a meeting with President Trump about the Iran War, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with evangelical leaders at the historic Blair House in Washington last Wednesday. Among the participants were Christian Zionist leader Mike Evans; Larry Huch, a televangelist deeply embedded in the Christian Zionist world; MAGA evangelical influencer Lance Wallnau; and broadcaster Erick Stakelbeck, whose dispatches from the Middle East can be seen on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) and YouTube. Evangelicals and Jews, Netanyahu told the assembled group, are part of the same “Judeo-Christian heritage” that is “under attack from the rising tide of antisemitism and anti-Evangelicalism.” Our enemies, his message was, are the same. “It’s not accidental that the two are coming under a joint attack,” Netanyahu said, “because we are one.”

They are one, Netanyahu’s evangelical supporters believe, in a war not against the far-right antisemites and anti-Zionists who have both defined and rocked Trump’s coalition, the ones who admire Hitler and engage in Holocaust denial. The true enemy, they contend, are Israel’s critics on the left. Similarly, critics of Christian nationalism are, in evangelical thinking, solely from the left. They conflate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism, and criticism of an American theocracy with anti-Christian bigotry.

As Trump’s war in Iran drags into its sixth month, with no end in sight for either the fighting or the global economic chaos he has unleashed, Netanyahu and his evangelical friends are watching American support for Trump, Israel, and the war evangelicals championed spiral downward. Disapproval of Trump has reached the mid-60s in several polls, approval of the Iran war is cratering, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, assault on Lebanon, and Jewish terrorism in the West Bank have combined for historically low regard for the country among Americans, including among Republicans. A recent Pew poll found that among white evangelicals, Trump’s and Israel’s most ardent base, favorable views of the Israeli government have dropped 10 points, from 67 to 57%, since 2019. A Fox News poll found white evangelicals nearly evenly split on approval of Trump’s handling of the Iran war, 50-49%. His overall approval rating among white evangelicals is just 59%. 

The intra-MAGA splintering over Israel and the Iran war is part of a broader, unfolding crackup in the world of MAGA influencers, hucksters, and aspiring policymakers, a fracturing that is playing out in declining audiences for far-right podcasters, a Catholic-evangelical feud at Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission over Christian Zionism, and infighting at the Heritage Foundation that has favored the antisemitic far right. Former Fox News host turned podcaster Tucker Carlson triggered the turmoil at Heritage by platforming the Hitler-admiring antisemite Nick Fuentes last year, which Heritage’s president Kevin Roberts refused to condemn. Carlson also made waves earlier this year with an interview with the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, a staunch Christian Zionist, who said Israel is biblically entitled to much of the land in the Middle East. The viral moment seemed, at the time, to set the table for a showdown between the Carlson-esque MAGA faction and Christian Zionists. It has been at a simmer since. (Although officially his job as Ambassador is to represent American interests in Israel, Huckabee can be seen on TBN promoting the interests of Israel’s government.)

The same day as the Netanyahu meeting, “Unclassified: News Behind the Headlines,” a program on televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Network, featured Wallnau speaking to host Greg Stephens about the gathering. Wallnau speculated that in his meeting on Tuesday with Trump, Netanyahu gave the president intelligence about Pickaxe Mountain, which Trump has threatened to bomb, and Iran’s nuclear program. (Wallnau offered no evidence for his claim.) He extolled Israel’s intelligence-gathering capacity and bravery, and tried to scare viewers by saying that “the same people” who attacked America on 9/11 “want a nuclear bomb.” (Not that this should require clarification, but no Iranians were involved in carrying out the 9/11 attacks.) Yet for these TV evangelicals, all Muslims are an undifferentiated enemy. Stephens brought up New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is distrusted because he’s a socialist and a Muslim and called on federal authorities to execute an International Criminal Court arrest warrant on Netanyahu when was in the U.S. last week. This was laughed off by Wallnau and Stephens’ other guest, televangelist Jesse Duplantis, who segued from mocking Mamdani to calling on Trump to more aggressively pursue regime change in Iran because “you don’t negotiate with killers.” (Perhaps the Fox News poll finding evangelical dissatisfaction with Trump’s handling of the Iran war is driven, in part, by some who believe he’s been insufficiently bellicose.)

When Stephens asked Wallnau about antisemitism on the right, and among Christians, Wallnau waved him off with a rant about “Marxist schools,” which appears to be his term for colleges and universities. At these unspecified “Marxist schools,” Wallnau said, students are taught that Israel is “the ultimate oppressor state” that is victimizing Palestinians. He proceeded to forecast the midterm framing, which is to conflate communism, DEI, and sin: “We will not be communist, we will not be socialist, we will not be diversity, equity, and inclusion, Marxist, driven by envy, greed, and violence, that will not work, but it’s going to require a very strong and engaged Body of Christ.” 

Much of this rhetoric is standard fare for an election year. The Christian right has a decades-old playbook for mobilizing the evangelical base fearful of a left that they know mostly from conspiracy theories and spiritual warfare rhetoric demonizing it. We see it in Trump’s increased use of tirades against communism in recent months. We see it in Netanyahu’s attempt to foment an evangelical anxiety about their shared persecutors — the left — with Jews.  Netanyahu doesn’t care that his evangelical friends, like Huch, work, as he told me in an interview more than a decade ago, to “devote all of our energy and all of our strength to preserving Jerusalem as one city” because, he said, “without a shadow of a doubt” Jews will recognize Jesus as the Messiah at the Second Coming. 

Evangelicals know that the intra-MAGA infighting centered on Israel is a problem for holding the Trump coalition together. But they are acting like they believe it’s a passing trend, or that they can outflank it within the Republican Party. They are banking on a very real phenomenon: that Israel is central to both the theology and politics of many evangelicals, a version of biblical and world events they’ve learned in church pews and school and bible study and television and conferences — an indoctrination much thicker than the parasocial relationships many MAGA followers have with the podcasters and online personalities who are now seeing their audiences shrink along with Trump’s standing. While the MAGA coalition is beset by a multitude of internal feuds, evangelicals are banking on their tried-and-true line of attack of blaming the left amid Trump’s self-inflicted catastrophe.