THE BIG STORY
After more than a year of chaos in the upper ranks of the Republican Party, President Donald Trump has finally weighed in on the so-called influencer wars—i.e., the intense ideological conflict between different right-wing factions that has played out in right-leaning media and social media for much of the past year.
This conflict has pitted a young and heavily online isolationist-Buchananite faction, led by Tucker Carlson and other loosely aligned influencers (Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and the circle around The American Conservative), against the more hawkish traditional Republican wing of MAGA, whose most vocal public champions have been American Jews such as Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin. The fight has often centered on Israel and Zionism as proxy issues, although it is in reality over much broader and more fundamental disagreements about the nature of America and its role in the world. Until recently, Trump had seemed happy to use...
