CNN
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Promising to bring peace easily and quickly, the president has now realized that he is taking into account yet another major escalation. President Donald Trump has publicly discouraged Israel to strike Iran as Israel pushed to secure a contract instead to cut Iran’s nuclear program.
But it didn’t pan out. Israel launched a massive attack overnight, targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities and killing senior officials.
It all reinforces how the world we live in is much more complicated than what we throw on the campaign trail.
And from a domestic perspective, the situation in Israel has undoubtedly been complicated for decades.
Several indicators suggest that American support for Israel has reached historic lows as the war in Gaza was dragged over. And Republicans are much more likely to support Israel than Democrats, but even that’s become more complicated. Especially as an influential voice against skepticism of the right voice of a hard-pressed approach to Iran.
Much remains of shaking amid the historic escalation of the Middle East. Things change. There are real questions about whether Iran is now capable of even important retaliation that could lead to a wider war.
But the US decision ahead is not as easy as they once saw, politically speaking.
A Kinipiac University poll released this week ahead of the Israeli strikes, represents a changing landscape.
For decades, I have asked Americans to choose whether to sympathize with Israelis and Palestinians. Israel has almost always been a runaway favorite. However, this showed that Americans had historically shown Israeli ally at narrow margins: 37% to 32%.
After Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Israel in October 2023, the margin was 61-13% courtesy of Israeli people. Therefore, the 48-point edge has been reduced to 5.
Data compiled by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research shows that this is not only the lowest advantage for Israel since Kinipiac began voting the question in 2001, but also the lowest among multiple polls.
These findings should not be strictly applied to the conflict between Israel and Iran. However, it is also clear that overall support for Israel has declined over the past year and a half.
To wit:
What was particularly impressive about that last one: these views were almost entirely nonpartisan. About four people, 10 Democrats, independents and Republicans, said that Israeli business wasn’t ours.
It suggests that Trump’s infusion of non-interventionism in the conservative movement has caught up, even if it was related to our most important allies in the Middle East.
But it’s more than just non-interventionism. There are also plenty of signs that even Republicans are stinking in Israel.
The Kinipiac poll showed the percentage of Republicans who sympathized with Israelis more than Palestinians, which fell from 86% in October 2023 to 64% today. (Almost all of the shifts were in a neutral position, not Palestinians.)
And Pew’s poll shows Israel’s unfavourable views between Republicans and Republican-leaning independents have risen to 37% from 27% in March. Most surprisingly, right-footed voters under the age of 50 were roughly evenly divided into Israeli views.
These modest but significant changes have occurred as certain corners of the MAGA movement adopted more skeptical of the American alliance with Israel and were warned against a hard-line approach to Iran.
These tensions are probably best illustrated by the intense, continuing feud between Fox News host Mark Levin and his former Fox colleague Tucker Carlson.
Carlson went Friday morning to the point where he said the US should completely separate from Israel. He said the Trump administration should “drop Israel. Let them fight their own war.”
Carlson said the US should not send troops and not provide funds or weapons.
Also, this week, the director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard used her personal X account to promote the mysterious video. She urged people to “reject this path to nuclear war,” saying certain “elite warmers” were carelessly pushing us forward, in the knowledge that they personally had nuclear shelters where no one else was there.
It is not clear whether Gabbard hints at tensions in the Middle East, for example, in contrast to the Russian-Ukraine war. But she has long advocated a softer approach to Iran. In 2020, she was still a Democrat, but she called Trump murdering a top Iranian commander an unconstitutional “act of war.”
Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy replied this week that Gabbard should “change her medicine.”
In other words, this is no longer simple on the right. Trump leads a nation and movement that is increasingly torn apart on the path ahead.
He has landed firmly on the corner of Israel so far. However, very difficult decisions can be ahead.