Marjorie Taylor Greene announced the start of a new political movement on August 1, posting a photograph from Tucker Carlson’s home in Maine showing herself alongside Carlson, Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, former National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent, and conservative journalist Brian Glenn, whom Greene married days earlier. “We said no more foreign wars and we meant it and supported Donald Trump because he made that promise,” Greene wrote. “But he’s betrayed us all. Our commitment is America First for all Americans, right, left, and center. The movement has begun.”
The five are united most directly by opposition to the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran, which began in February with joint American and Israeli strikes. Each has accused Trump of abandoning the “no more foreign wars” pledge that anchored his campaign. Carlson said he has not spoken with the president since the war began and described him in stark terms. “I feel sorry for him,” Carlson said. “He’s not a man in charge of his own life at this point.” Kent, who resigned from his post at the National Counterterrorism Center in March in the first protest resignation of a senior Trump official over the war, wrote at the time that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” The White House rejected the claim outright, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt calling it “insulting and laughable.”
The breaks predate the war for some of the group. Greene had already split with Trump over his administration’s handling of the Epstein files before the Iran war began, and resigned from Congress in January rather than face what she called a “hurtful and hateful” primary. Massie, who also broke with Trump over the Epstein files, lost his own primary in May to retired Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein after outside groups backed by the president spent heavily against him; his term ends in January. In late July, Massie voted for a war powers resolution aimed at limiting Trump’s authority to continue the Iran war, which passed the House 214-208.
Trump has responded to the group with unusually personal attacks, calling Greene a “traitor,” Carlson a “Low IQ person,” Kent a “SLEAZEBAG,” and Massie “Weak and Pathetic.” Far-right activist and Trump loyalist Laura Loomer went further than the president himself, writing that the group belonged “on a government watch list” and were being “amplified by foreign adversaries,” without offering evidence for either claim.
Carlson has been the most explicit about long-term ambitions, telling the Columbia Journalism Review in July that he intends to help build a third party, though he has said repeatedly he does not want to be a candidate himself. “There’s going to be a third party, and I’m going to do everything I can to bring that about,” he said, describing the current two-party system as “a one-party state posing as a democracy” on matters of war and spending. Greene had floated similar ideas in a June interview with Piers Morgan, describing the possibility of “a true America-focused party” drawing from disaffected voters on both the right and left. The war has come at a real cost by the numbers cited in the group’s criticism: 18 American service members and thousands of Iranians have been killed since February, and polling shows a majority of Americans oppose the war, though history offers little precedent for third-party movements translating that opposition into electoral success.
What It Means for Israel
The coalition fracturing here is not a marginal one. Greene, Carlson, and Massie were, for years, among the most visible and aggressive faces of Trump’s base, and their departure marks the clearest sign yet that support for Israel’s war against Iran carries a real cost within his own movement rather than uniting it. That matters beyond this one war. The same rhetorical framework being built now, that continued backing of Israel is a betrayal of “America First” rather than an expression of it, is reusable well past a ceasefire, and it gives an increasingly organized wing of the American right a ready-made argument against future US support for Israel on any front, not just this one.
It also signals something about where public opinion inside the coalition actually sits. Trump built his political identity in large part on skepticism of Washington’s foreign policy establishment and promises to avoid prolonged Middle Eastern entanglements. A war launched in coordination with Israel, resulting in this level of public defection from figures who spent years defending him, tests how durable pro-Israel sentiment actually is among Trump’s most loyal voters once it collides with the isolationist instincts that got many of them to support him in the first place.
The Lobby, Named Again
Kent’s specific language deserves attention on its own, separate from the broader political story. Attributing American military action to “pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby” is not a new argument. It is one of the oldest and most recognizable frames in modern antisemitic discourse: the claim that Jewish or Israeli influence, operating through a shadowy, disproportionately powerful lobby, secretly directs a country’s foreign policy against its own citizens’ interests and against the judgment of its own elected leadership. The framing does not require using the word “Jewish” to carry that weight. It relies on the same structure regardless of who invokes it, an all-powerful, foreign-aligned lobby overriding American sovereignty, and that structure has a documented history stretching from the protocols of early twentieth-century Europe through decades of American political discourse.
That the White House itself rejected Kent’s framing as “insulting and laughable” is notable, since it did not come from a pro-Israel advocacy group but from the administration Kent had served. Carlson’s own rhetoric has followed a similar pattern without using Kent’s explicit lobby language, calling the war “disgusting and evil” while declining to identify any comparable explanation for American involvement beyond Israeli influence. None of this requires assuming any individual’s personal motivations, which cannot be known from a news report and are not this piece’s business to adjudicate. What can be said plainly is that the specific argument now anchoring part of this movement, that Israel and its lobby, not American strategic interests or the president’s own judgment, are what actually drove the country into war, is not a new or neutral claim. It is a very old one, and its return to the mouths of a sitting president’s former inner circle, rather than its usual home on the political fringes, is itself the more significant story here.
A Test Case, Days Before the Movement Launched
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro made much the same argument on his Daily Wire show, tying the group’s rhetoric to a broader pattern he has tracked on what he calls the “horseshoe right.” Shapiro pointed to the migrant crisis in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, a story involving only Morocco and a Spanish government’s migration policy, as a case study in how reliably that instinct resurfaces. “The horseshoe right has joined the left on economics and they’ve joined the radical Muslims on Jews, and it all fits beautifully together,” he said, describing the Ceuta episode as a situation “created purely by the factors of Islamic migration and invasion” and Spanish policy, before noting that “somehow both the horseshoe right and the left found a way to blame… the Jews.”
He singled out Massie by name, quoting a tweet in which the congressman wrote, “Don’t fall for the fake Fox GOP outrage over Ceuta,” and claimed a bill passed two weeks earlier had “greenlighted the transfer of Spanish territory to Morocco.” Shapiro called the claim baseless, noting the language Massie pointed to was committee discussion notes rather than anything in the bill’s approved text. He treated Greene’s version of the same claim, that “Republicans paid 40 million of your tax dollars to Morocco to invade Spain,” as an equally unsupported leap: “You’re going to have to connect the dots.” He also cited a post from Candace Owens tying the crisis to the historical presence of the Star of David on Morocco’s flag under the Alawite dynasty, calling it emblematic of a search for hidden symbols rather than an actual explanation for events on the ground.
Shapiro’s broader diagnosis was blunt. “Anti-Semitism, in the end, is just a conspiracy theory about power, focusing on the Jews,” he said, arguing that a movement built on distrust of meritocracy will inevitably arrive at Jewish success in finance and education as evidence the system itself is “rigged.” He also challenged Republican leadership directly for staying quiet, pointing to the same “no enemies to the right” standard the movement’s members have invoked against their critics in the past. “The vice president would like for the Republicans to do well in the midterms,” he said, adding that Vice President JD Vance’s team “can’t pretend ignorance about this,” given that the group has openly discussed forming a third party to run against the administration.
Whether Greene’s movement becomes a functioning third party or fades as quickly as it appeared, the argument it has already put into wide circulation, that support for Israel is incompatible with America’s own interests, is likely to outlast the specific war that triggered it.
