Marjorie Taylor Greene, as usual, was furious. “Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA,” she posted on X. “We have spent TRILLIONS in the Middle East and we have dealt with the aftermath of death, blown apart bodies, never ending suicides, and disabling PTSD.”

“All because they told us propaganda as to why we must sacrifice our own to defend some other country’s borders and some other country’s borders.”

For those who only casually follow Republican politics, the full dispatch from Greene, a far-right Georgia congresswoman who fiercely supports Donald Trump, may have sounded like a cri de coeur from an antiwar leftist. “I don’t want to see Israel bombed or Iran bombed or Gaza bombed. I don’t want to see Ukraine bombed or Russia bombed. And we do NOT want to be involved or required to pay for ANY OF IT!!!”

And so, as Israel and Iran trade rocket fire and threaten to enmesh the United States in a new war in the Middle East, the MAGA movement hits a genuine crossroads that cannot be ignored any longer. As Trump stormed back to the presidency, there was always a certain cognitive dissonance among his strongest backers because, when it came to foreign policy, they believed in fundamentally different approaches. They could unite, as always, around owning the libs, but Benjamin Netanyahu’s battle with Iran does not fit into that matrix at all.

Since MAGA has grown large enough to swallow the Republican Party whole, these contradictions cannot be easily resolved. Traditional Republicans with hawkish, neoconservative views like Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton are, in 2025, unflappable Trump foot soldiers. “We should stand unequivocally with Israel,” Cruz, the Texas senator, said recently. Within the Republican Party, unflinching support for Israel is, in most cases, sacrosanct, especially as progressive Democrats grow deeply critical of Benjamin Netanyahu’s war in Gaza. Orthodox Jews and Evangelical Christians, the two groups who embrace Israel most, overwhelmingly vote Republican in presidential elections. Mark Levin, the right-wing talk-radio host who has urged the White House to back strikes on Iran, argued that the demand that Trump not back Israel “is not MAGA. It’s isolationist, which he has never been.”

But Greene — like Tucker Carlson, who urged Republicans to “Drop Israel. Let them fight their own wars” — speaks for a new constituency. Among the younger cohort of MAGA politicians, activists, and influencers, there isn’t great affection for Israel. If some of this might be a product of the far right’s antisemitic streak, there is also an earnest commitment to isolationism that cannot be reconciled with the current American foreign-policy consensus. It is, indeed, not really America First to unconditionally ship arms to Israel and egg Netanyahu on for every new military venture. American interests are not served by a catastrophic war with Iran, which could trigger the kind of regime-change campaign that would take decades to resolve and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Trump’s isolationism is always overstated, but he is less hawkish than his Republican predecessors. His willingness to criticize the Iraq War during the 2016 primary was a watershed moment for American politics.

What won’t salve the internal clashes within MAGA are Trump’s own contradictions and hypocrisies. The mercurial president offers something for everyone. He has reaffirmed, many times, his full dedication to Israel. He has never withheld military support, and he has endorsed the war in Gaza. “We of course support Israel, obviously, and supported it like nobody has ever supported it,” he told CNN. Yet Trump has also, unlike most conventional Republican politicians, been willing to make direct criticisms of Israel’s leadership. “They’re losing the PR war. They’re losing it big. But they’ve got to finish what they started, and they’ve got to finish it fast, and we have to get on with life,” he complained to Hugh Hewitt about the war in Gaza. Back in 2016, Trump drew a great deal of fire from pro-Israel Republicans when he said he’d be a “neutral guy” in any negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. (He never was, of course.)

Assuming the clash between Iran and Israel does not escalate into a full-scale war and embroil the U.S., the next test case for MAGA’s relationship with the Middle East will be the 2028 election. J.D. Vance, the likely GOP nominee in three years, has strained to explain that America’s “special relationship” with Israel fits firmly into the America First framework — and how shipping arms, in perpetuity, to the Jewish state differs greatly from the MAGA resistance to America backing Ukraine in its bid to repel an ongoing Russian invasion. “Israel is one of the most dynamic, certainly on a per capita basis, one of the most dynamic and technologically advanced countries in the world,” Vance said last year.

One of the main reasons, though, he declared America should back Israel is because “a majority of citizens of this country think that their Savior, and I count myself a Christian, was born and died and resurrected in that narrow little strip of territory on the Mediterranean.” This religious reasoning, compelling to the Republican Party’s Evangelical base, means much less to fresher MAGA converts and louder isolationists like Carlson and Greene. It’s unclear how much influence the religious right will exert on the next GOP primary and if Vance will be at the vanguard of the movement he purports to lead, especially as Trump recedes. Life after Trump, certainly, will not be very straightforward for the MAGA faithful.