Collapse of the Cranks

By Abe Greenwald

Wednesday, March 17, 2026

 

The war on Iran has already had one beneficial effect on the U.S. It’s forcing a much-needed spring cleaning on the American right. The conservatives and the obsessive anti-Israel America-bashers are actively parting ways. The schism is turning into a sorting, and the country needs this as much as the right does.

 

At last, Donald Trump is in an open war of words with the subversives who had been pretending to be supporters. Tucker Carlson, the mercenary leader of the anti-American right, claimed that Trump was duped by Israel into Operation Epic Fury, which he also described as “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Trump then said that Carlson had “lost his way” and is not MAGA. Carlson now claims that the administration has surveilled him and is working to prosecute him as a foreign agent. 

 

Trump has also gone after Carlson’s gutter-mouthed yes-woman, Megyn Kelly. And he did so in the way that would precisely wound her most—he never mentioned her name. On Truth Social, he wrote a florid defense of conservative talker Mark Levin, whom Kelly has been attacking for months, and predicted that “those who speak ill of Mark will quickly fall by the wayside, as do the people whose ideas, policies, and footings are not sound.”

 

Today comes news that another unsound thinker has dropped by the wayside. Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, has resigned over the war on Iran. His resignation blames Israel for conning the U.S. into war and, creatively, for the death of his wife, who was killed in Syria in 2019 by a suicide bomber.

 

Whether they’re kicked out or they decide to leave the Trump coalition, the paranoids of the right are in the minority. Polls show that Republicans, and specifically MAGA voters, overwhelmingly support the war in Iran and the U.S.-Israel alliance.

 

The anti-Semites who sought to dominate the right and steer American foreign policy are watching their dreams die. And those who either naively or cynically believed that the right could accommodate both Israel supporters and activists dedicated to sundering the U.S.-Israeli relationship are being proven wrong.

 

If, God willing, the war in Iran continues on its current trajectory and ends in American and Israeli victory, the anti-American Israel-haters will be cast deep into the wilderness. At which point, I have no doubt, they will overtly join the left.

 

Then there’s poor JD Vance. Nothing about the current state of play works in his favor. That he is the vice president in an administration carrying out the exact foreign policy he has denounced makes him look like a non-entity. He’s already considered a sell-out among the groypers he’s tried to reassure. And in the event of American victory, no one will forget where he stood at the start—and where Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stood all along. That’s what happens when you throw in your lot with conspiracy-theorizing podcasters instead of your country.

 

So the war is flushing the Jew-haters and anti-Americans out of MAGA. Ideally, liberals would purge the mirror-image maniacs of the left from their movement. They’ve chosen instead to elevate them. The United States can survive, miraculously, if one major political party welcomes America-haters and anti-Semites. But a United States dominated by two competing visions of destruction and revolution is national suicide. Donald Trump is now winning more than one war for the future of the United States.