This is how winning political coalitions unravel. An unforeseen development roils one of the major political parties.

For the Democratic Party, that development was Donald Trump in 2016. For the Republican Party, that development is growing antisemitism on the right, especially among younger voters.

The smoldering tensions flared into open view with Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with the proudly racist, misogynist and Jew-hating influencer Nick Fuentes. The fallout has opened a rift between the populist right and traditional conservatives that threatens to splinter the remarkable coalition — younger and more racially diverse than previous GOP coalitions — that Republicans presumably hope to inherit from Trump.

“The blood and soil nationalism of Israel, it stems from this ethno-religion which is Judaism,” Fuentes said at one point in his interview with Carlson. Carlson’s response: “This is (Black Lives Matter) the new version. This is identity politics.” Later in the interview, Fuentes asserts that “you cannot actually divorce Israel and the neocons from Jewishness … They’re a stateless people, they’re unassimilable.” He then proceeds to insist that American Jews view the U.S. as “not really my home — my ancestral home is in Israel.” Carlson’s response? Crickets.

That a mainstream figure like Carlson would give unchallenged airtime to an antisemite like Fuentes isn’t necessarily shocking. The Anti-Defamation League finds that belief in antisemitic tropes is increasing, especially among the young, and that 15% of Republicans and 11% of Democrats say violence against Jews is justifiable. Over 95% of both Democratic and Republican Jews say antisemitism in America is rising, according to a 2025 Washington Post poll.

Many traditionally conservative Republicans are appalled at Carlson’s antisemitic turn and worried about the rise of Jew-hatred on the populist right being fueled by influencers like Fuentes. This tug-of-war over the GOP’s future was foreshadowed during Trump’s first term, with events like the march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” and a mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue that left a dozen Jewish worshippers dead. Now, the populist right — a key part of the GOP base under Trump — has also begun to show an increasing hostility toward Israel and toward the diplomatic and military aid the U.S. provides the Jewish State. That’s a clear break from the party’s establishment.

Yet many traditional Republicans remain reluctant to criticize Carlson. The former Fox News host is popular on the populist right and his podcast is among the country’s most influential media platforms. Others fear alienating the populists, concerned Republicans cannot defeat Democrats in national elections without them. That was essentially the argument Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, made to justify the Washington think-tank maintaining its ties with Carlson following the Fuentes interview.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, 54, is not among them. That’s significant because Cruz, a Trump ally whose own political career has been fueled by conservative populism, has designs on running for president again (he was the runner-up for the Republican nomination in 2016, falling to the future 45th and 47th president). Cruz has emerged as a vocal Carlson opponent and among the most prominent GOP figures to warn against letting antisemitism on the right go unchecked.

“I believe now, today, is a time for choosing,” he said Friday, challenging his party to step up during an address to the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group. As Jewish Insider reported , Cruz was invoking Ronald Reagan’s seminal 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing.”

Of course, as antisemitism has become a thing in American politics, it hasn’t only created an internecine battle on the right. It has also riven the Democratic Party.

Center-left Democrats seeking to preserve their party’s historic support for Israel were (and still are) at odds with their left-wing brethren, despite the U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire. The far-left’s opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war, following the massacre of hundreds of Israeli civilians by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, manifested across the country not only in protests on college campuses. It also took the form of antisemitic violence and the targeting of Jewish-owned businesses.

Jewish voters are, historically, a liberal voting bloc, and many stuck with Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, in 2024. But Trump also grew his share of the Jewish vote to record levels for a Republican, according to exit polling collected by the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Trump has been incredibly supportive of Israel. He moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, negotiated the Abraham Accords that led to peace between the Jewish State and its Arab neighbors and supported Netanyahu’s prosecution of the Gaza War (and his decision to strike Iran).

But now, in the fall of 2025, it’s increasingly clear that antisemitism is not simply a problem for the Democratic Party. It has also infected Trump’s GOP.

Matt K. Lewis, a conservative columnist often critical of Trump, told me the president shoulders some of the blame because he has fostered a philosophy of victimhood, framing the struggles of his loyal voters as the result of conspiracies. This sort of rhetoric, Lewis posited, lends itself to one of the world’s oldest and most enduring conspiracy theories: Jew hatred.

“When people feel like the game is rigged against them and they’re being victimized and they’re being told that by the president of the United States, that makes them much more susceptible to all sorts of radical ideas that would be unthinkable,” said Lewis, author of “Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections.”

Lewis’ argument is plausible. But there’s another factor that Republicans — or anyone on the right — should consider if they’re worried about the GOP being hijacked by right-wing antisemitism.

In the four decades from Reagan to Trump, Republicans generally fought the Democrats using ideas as weapons; and conservative media personalities used whatever ideological authority they possessed to enforce party dogma. But during Obama’s presidency, Republicans and their media allies got it into their heads that the U.S. was on the brink of an irreversible collapse that could only be prevented by permanently blocking the Democrats from power. Ideology became secondary — if that — to defeating the left.

With that in mind, it’s only logical that, as long as their votes are on offer, some Republicans are willing to tolerate antisemites in their midst.

David M. Drucker is a columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of “In Trump’s Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP.” He wrote this column for Bloomberg Opinion.

Last week, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a “special message” on immigration that was an unmistakable rebuke of the Trump administration and its cruel and punitive immigration crackdown. The message did not mention President Donald Trump by name, but its meaning could not have been clearer.

By a vote of 216-5, with three abstentions, the bishops approved a statement that said, in part: “We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement. We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants.”

The bishops also opposed “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and prayed for “an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement.”

A number of bishops also read the statement out loud in a powerful video message posted on YouTube.

The bishops were following the lead of Pope Leo XIV, who has raised a number of specific objections to the Trump administration’s treatment of migrants. In September, the pope told journalists, “Someone who says I am against abortion but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

On Nov. 4, journalists asked the pope specifically about the treatment of detainees at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois. Federal officials had denied entry to the facility to a delegation that included a Catholic bishop who hoped to offer Communion to the inmates inside.

The pope responded with an appeal to Scripture: “Jesus says very clearly at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, you know, how did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and welcome him or not? And I think that there’s a deep reflection that needs to be made in terms of what’s happening.”

This isn’t the first time that the Republican immigration crackdown has clashed with Catholic religious liberty. In January, I highlighted a disturbing case in Texas, where the attorney general, Ken Paxton, was directly attacking the religious freedom rights of the Annunciation House, a religious nonprofit founded by Catholics in El Paso. Paxton made the remarkable argument that blocking Annunciation House from providing food, shelter and clothing to migrants would not substantially burden its free exercise of religion.

Serving the most marginalized is fundamental to the Christian faith. By one count, more than 2,000 scriptural passages mandate or endorse service to the poor and the work of justice.

In May, just after the pope’s election, I wrote that the most important American in the world was no longer named Donald Trump. The president has less than four years left at the center of the international stage. The pope will present a global moral witness for years to come, and it’s a moral witness that is fundamentally incompatible with the cruelty and corruption of Trumpism.

If you examine the new pope’s pronouncements, there is a consistent through line. He defends human dignity and condemns government brutality. In addition to his defense of the human rights of migrants, he’s decried Russian abuses in Ukraine, and he’s called for a ceasefire, hostage release and compliance with international humanitarian law in the Gaza Strip.

His concern for human dignity extends to the world of technology and commerce as well. On Nov. 7, for example, he posted on social media: “Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight, for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity. The Church therefore calls all builders of #AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work — to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.”

The pope’s comment drew an immediate rebuke from Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and Trump supporter, who posted (and then deleted) a meme mocking the pope’s statement.

Each of the pope’s statements is part of a consistent ethic of life. I love Catholic writer Mark Shea’s description of what this ethic means — that “all human beings, without any exception whatsoever, are made in the image and likeness of God and that Jesus Christ died for all human beings, without any exception whatsoever. Therefore each human person — without any exception whatsoever — is sacred and is the only creature that God wills for its own sake.”

In this formulation, the fundamental moral basis of the pro-life movement is the idea that every single human being is created in the image of God and thus should be treated with dignity and respect at every stage of life, a concept that includes abortion but extends far beyond it as well.

In this context, it is a mistake to view abortion as somehow distinct from the dehumanization and abuse of migrants. The holistic pro-life view doesn’t just ask, “Is a baby being harmed?” It asks, “Are people being harmed?”

And make no mistake, people are being harmed. To take just one dreadful example, last Wednesday, The Guardian reported that two human rights groups had found that “more than 252 Venezuelans expelled to El Salvador under Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy suffered systematic and prolonged torture and abuse, including sexual assault,” during their detention at a notorious El Salvadoran prison named CECOT.

When I said that the path past Trumpism is beginning to emerge, I did not and do not mean that the pope will somehow enable the defeat of any particular politician or program at the ballot box. American Catholics are true swing voters. A majority voted for Trump in 2024, but a majority disapprove of him now. And there are many devout Catholics who are deeply embedded in the MAGA movement, including Vice President JD Vance

Partisanship is poisonous to the church

Neither party’s political platform truly embodies the teachings of the New Testament. Each party has its moral strengths and weaknesses, which is why you can find Christians and people of every faith and no faith on both sides of the political aisle.

But when partisanship becomes part of your identity — much less part of your faith — it has a pernicious effect: It causes you to highlight the deficiencies of the other side while tempting you to rationalize or minimize the injustices on your own. Partisanship makes hypocrites of us all. I know it made a hypocrite of me on my worst partisan days.

The approach that Pope Leo takes, by contrast, puts virtue outside and above politics. His declarations are the living embodiment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s admonition that the church “is not to be the master or the servant of the state, but the conscience of the state.”

I’m not Catholic, but I can see that the Catholic Church enjoys some profound advantages over the American evangelical church in taking King’s approach. The Catholic Church is a global church that existed for more than a thousand years before the founding of America. American evangelicals, by contrast, often belong to churches and denominations that were founded in America, remain rooted in America, and they have a distinct, America-centered political worldview.

Sadly, this means that American evangelical influence is often rooted more in its partisan affiliations than in its moral witness. When Republicans dominate the government, evangelicals tend to feel more confident and secure. When Democrats win the White House, then evangelicals tend to feel more defensive and fearful, as if their churches are at the edge of extinction.

The result is a relentless one-way cultural ratchet that amplifies Democratic sins and minimizes Republican vices. It elevates politics to the place of religion because it is only through politics that many evangelicals can feel confident and secure in the practice of their faith.

This is why Trumpism is a thoroughly religious movement. Trump owes his political power to white evangelicals more than to any other group. In fact, according to exit polls, if you removed white evangelical votes from the 2024 presidential election, Trump would have lost in a 58% to 40% landslide, which would have been more than enough to turn the Electoral College in Kamala Harris’ favor.

Since Trumpism is a religious phenomenon, it requires a religious answer. But it can’t be a partisan answer. That’s why it was wise for the bishops not to directly mention Trump in their statement. The goal isn’t to attack one man or one movement, but to uphold a particular set of values and to measure every politician — including politicians of your own party — by his or her dedication to the notion, as Shea wrote, that “each human person — without any exception whatsoever — is sacred.”

If you’re a Republican in part because you believe that Democrats disregard the value of unborn life, that doesn’t mean that you abandon migrants to degrading and inhumane treatment because you don’t want to risk stoking outrage against the Republican Party and its leaders.

Conversely, it’s a profound mistake to swallow your tongue when Democrats advance permissive abortion rules because you’re worried that calling out, say, Sen. Chuck Schumer or Rep. Hakeem Jeffries will help Trump.

I’m under no illusions that Pope Leo’s example will matter to the evangelical political class. It is so far gone that many of its leading lights advance the absurd claim that Christians cannot vote for Democrats.

Moral witness

But a pope’s moral witness can — and should — still matter to Christians of every tradition. The American evangelical church is one tributary to the broad stream of American (much less global) Christianity. There is an enormous amount of theological cross-pollination in the United States.

I know this because I’ve experienced it. Pope John Paul II’s seminal encyclical on the value of human life, Evangelium Vitae, has influenced me more than any Protestant book about the dignity of all human life. I grew up in an evangelical intellectual culture that saw Pope John Paul II’s opposition to the brutality of communism as an indispensable element in the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of liberal democracy in Eastern Europe.

In the words of Barbara Elliott, a fellow of the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, the pope achieved a “spiritual victory” over Soviet communism. He was the “spiritual leader of this peaceful revolution that shattered communism.”

Unless the values behind Trumpism are defeated, the man himself will be replaced by another like him — Republican or Democrat — and our culture will continue to slide into cruelty and depravity.

To quote Pope Leo, “justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life” ought to be the touchstones of our public engagement. There is another spiritual victory to be won — this time over the forces of hatred, division and cruelty in these United States.

David French writes a column for the New York Times.

 

By MOHAMMAD ZAATARI, Associated Press

SIDON, Lebanon (AP) — An Israeli airstrike on a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon on Tuesday killed 13 people and wounded several others, state media and government officials said. It was the deadliest strike on Lebanon since a ceasefire in the Israel-Hezbollah war a year ago.

The drone strike hit a car in the parking lot of a mosque in the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp on the outskirts of the coastal city of Sidon, the state-run National News Agency said. The Lebanese Health Ministry said 13 people were killed and several others wounded in the airstrike, without giving further details.

Hamas fighters in the area prevented journalists from reaching the scene, as ambulances rushed to evacuate the wounded and the dead.

The Israeli military said it struck a Hamas training compound that was being used to prepare an attack against Israel and its army. It added that the Israeli army would continue to act against Hamas wherever the group operates.

Hamas condemned the attack in a statement saying the strike hit a sports playground and denying that it was a training compound.

Over the past two years, Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon have killed scores of officials from the militant Hezbollah group as well as Palestinian factions such as Hamas.

Saleh Arouri, the deputy political head of Hamas and a founder of the group’s military wing, was killed in a drone strike on a southern suburb of Beirut on Jan. 2, 2024. Several other Hamas officials have been killed in strikes since then.

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Hamas led the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people. That sparked Israel’s offensive on the Gaza Strip that killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

A day after the Israel-Hamas war started, Hezbollah began firing rockets toward Israeli posts along the border. Israel responded with shelling and airstrikes in Lebanon, and the two sides became locked in an escalating conflict that became a full-blown war in late September 2024.

That war, the most recent of several conflicts involving Hezbollah over the past four decades, killed more than 4,000 people in Lebanon, including hundreds of civilians, and caused an estimated $11 billion worth of destruction, according to the World Bank. In Israel, 127 people died, including 80 soldiers.

The war ended in late November 2024 with a U.S.-brokered ceasefire. Since then, Israel has carried out scores of airstrikes in Lebanon, saying that Hezbollah is trying to rebuild its capabilities.

Lebanon’s Health Ministry has reported more than 270 people killed and around 850 wounded by Israeli military actions since the ceasefire.

By FABIOLA SÁNCHEZ, Associated Press

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s president on Tuesday ruled out allowing U.S. strikes against cartels on Mexican soil, a day after U.S. President Donald Trump said he was willing to do whatever it takes to stop drugs entering the U.S.

“It’s not going to happen,” Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said Tuesday.

“He (Trump) has suggested it on various occasions or he has said, ‘we offer you a United States military intervention in Mexico, whatever you need to fight the criminal groups,’” she said. “But I have told him on every occasion that we can collaborate, that they can help us with information they have, but that we operate in our territory, that we do not accept any intervention by a foreign government.”

Sheinbaum said she had said it to Trump and to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and that they have understood.

“Would I want strikes in Mexico to stop drugs? OK with me, whatever we have to do to stop drugs,” Trump said Monday, adding that he’s “not happy with Mexico.”

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico shared a video through social platform X later Monday that included previous comments from Rubio saying that the U.S. would not take unilateral action in Mexico.

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Meanwhile, Mexican and U.S. diplomats were trying to sort out Tuesday what may have been an actual U.S. incursion.

On Monday, men arrived in a boat to a beach in northeast Mexico and installed some signs signaling land that the U.S. Department of Defense considered restricted.

Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said late Monday that the country’s Navy had removed the signs, which appeared to be on Mexican territory. And on Tuesday, Sheinbaum said that the International Boundary and Water Commission, a binational agency that determines the border between the two countries, was getting involved.

The signs, driven into the sand near where the Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico, caused a stir when witnesses said men in a boat arrived at the local beach known as Playa Bagdad and erected them.

The signs read in English and Spanish “Warning: Restricted Area” and went on to explain that it was Department of Defense property and had been declared restricted by “the commander.” It said there could be no unauthorized access, photography or drawings of the area.

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mexico contacted its consulate in Brownsville, Texas and then the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. Eventually, it was determined that contractors working for some U.S. government entity had placed the signs, Sheinbaum said.

“But the river changes its course, it breaks loose and according to the treaty you have to clearly demarcate the national border,” Sheinbaum said during her daily press briefing.

The area is close to SpaceX Starbase, which sits adjacent to Boca Chica Beach on the Texas side of the Rio Grande.

The facility and launch site for the SpaceX rocket program is under contract with the Department of Defense and NASA, which hopes to send astronauts back to the moon and someday to Mars.

In June, Sheinbaum said the government was looking into contamination from the SpaceX facility after pieces of metal, plastic and rocket pieces were reportedly found on the Mexican side of the border following the explosion of a rocket during a test.

The area also carries the added sensitivity of Trump’s order to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, which Mexico has also rejected.