By Natalie Andrews and Joshua Chaffin
When Joe Kent resigned his post this week as the White House's chief counterterrorism officer over his opposition to President Trump's Iran war he appeared to be out of touch with MAGA world.
But Kent's antipathy for Trump's Iran strikes -- for which he blamed Israel and its lobbyists -- has chimed with one vital constituency: an isolationist faction of leading influencers and stars of the conservative podcast arena where so much MAGA discourse transpires.
Chief among them is Tucker Carlson, who hailed Kent on a live podcast on Wednesday evening, saying he hoped his resignation would be the "beginning of the long overdue truth telling." Carlson also echoed Kent's assertion that Israel was driving U.S. foreign policy.
The White House has maintained that the war has widespread backing . "The President does not make these incredibly important national security decisions based on fluid opinion polls, but on the best interest of the American people," said White House spokesman Davis Ingle.
For a president who has enjoyed the adulation of conservative podcasters and celebrated their electoral influence, the criticism might prove uncomfortable. Nor is Carlson the only one now clashing with the administration over the war and the U.S.'s once-sacrosanct relationship with Israel.
Megyn Kelly, the onetime Fox News personality who now has her own online platform, has also questioned whether the war is "good for America" -- as has Candace Owens, another popular influencer who supported Trump in 2024 and has become a vociferous critic of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "I don't know how he cannot see how his base, his actual base, is reacting right now," Owens said of the president during an interview on Wednesday.
Kelly and Owens are among the many dissenting podcasters who invoke the late Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was close to Trump and credited with bringing a younger generation into the MAGA fold. Kirk argued against going to war with Iran before he was assassinated last September.
Their criticism has prompted aggressive pushback by a band of pro-Israel MAGA rivals. Laura Loomer, a podcaster and conservative influencer who speaks to Trump regularly, said during an interview that the antiwar podcasters are "the woke right" and accused them of being antisemitic and paid by foreign interests "to divide the base," though there is no evidence of such payments.
The attacks have at times become vicious -- and personal. Mark Levin, a Fox News host and Iran hawk, has for months attacked Kelly on X and recently called her an "emotionally unhinged, lewd and petulant wreck." She responded on X, saying Levin had a "micropenis."
Even Trump weighed in, defending Levin, whom he called "a truly Great American Patriot," who was "somewhat under siege by other people with far less Intellect."
Kelly then accused Levin of "crying to Daddy."
Whether the Kent furor presages a broader MAGA split over the war is hard to know. If nothing else, though, it highlights the populist movement's rancorous fault line over Israel. It is a divide that Trump, the final word on all things MAGA, has managed to straddle but which a successor might not.
"They are...definitely, having an impact on younger voters, under 40. That is not up for debate," Elizabeth Barcohana, the chair of Jewish community engagement for the California Republican Party, said of Carlson and his ilk. Such podcasters, she feared, were grooming a future generation of Republicans in their image.
Others talk of a "Jewish Derangement Syndrome" that has infected the movement -- a conspiratorial view that powerful Jews are pulling the strings. Under that logic, that would make Israel and its "powerful American lobby," as Kent called them, to blame for an unpopular war -- not Trump.
"On the ground, there is a divide," said Max Rice, a young conservative writer in Chicago. "I would say the younger generation is more anti-Israel." Their disenchantment has been fueled, at least in part, by the war in Gaza.
Rice, who is Jewish, viewed some of the anti-Israel rhetoric as an extension of MAGA's antiestablishment instinct -- one that sometimes veers into paranoia. In its theatrics, he also saw some of the podcast economy's incentives at work. "In this polarized world, it's profitable to take a hard stand -- but not [be] in the middle," he said.
A survey conducted recently by Quinnipiac University showed that 85% of self-identified Republicans back Trump's actions in Iran. Broadly, 53% of all poll respondents opposed the strikes. Numerous polls also show voters of all parties vehemently disapprove of troops on the ground or a drawn-out conflict.
Conservative podcasters such as Joe Rogan and Theo Von have been a bellwether for detecting early stirrings in the base. Rogan said last week that Trump's decision to strike Iran "seems so insane based on what he ran on."
When Gabe Guidarini, a senior at the University of Dayton, read Kent's resignation letter on Tuesday he recognized familiar attitudes among Republicans of his generation.
The 21-year-old Guidarini -- chair of the Ohio College Republican Federation -- didn't accept Kent's contention that Israel had duped Trump into war with Iran. "I don't think Trump can be duped," he said. Nor did he appreciate Kent's disloyalty to the president by resigning in such a public fashion.
Still, Guidarini shared Kent's misgivings about American involvement in the Middle East, having grown up watching failed campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Based on his experience organizing college voters during the 2024 election, he said many more were sympathetic to Kent's view of the war than the current Republican Party orthodoxy.
"I don't agree with the language he used but I understand some of the sentiment underlying that letter," said Guidarini. The sooner Trump could explain the war and his aims, the better, he added.
Write to Natalie Andrews at natalie.andrews@wsj.com and Joshua Chaffin at joshua.chaffin@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 19, 2026 05:00 ET (09:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
