Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tina Nguyen.

Marjorie Taylor Greene may be drawing headlines right now for her decision to launch a motion-to-vacate attempt against Mike Johnson. (Here we go again, right?) But she also elicited gasps by tweeting that she’d vote against a bill condemning antisemitism, claiming that it would “convict Christians” who believed “the gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.” It might be the most extreme example of a shift I’ve noticed these days in the American right—that the Republican Party’s support of Israel may no longer be ironclad—and given the rise of antisemitism across the country, to say nothing of college campuses, that vibe shift requires some excavation. More on that, below the fold.

But first, Abby Livingston has the latest dish from around the Capitol…

• Johnson vs. M.T.G.: Earlier today, Marjorie Taylor Greene announced that she would deploy a motion-to-vacate vote against Johnson early next week. (Punishment, in part, for allowing the Ukraine funding vote.) But given the political cover that Hakeem Jeffries and the Democrats have offered Johnson, vowing to block any such effort, it’s hard to see M.T.G’s threat as anything more than symbolic. Johnson retorted with the most velvet-gloved Southern jab, telling NewsNation: “Bless her heart.” Insiders are wondering whether the Omar Little Rule will apply here—will M.T.G. wield more or less power after Democrats and Republicans procedurally kill her motion?
• McCarthy’s revenge tour: Then there’s Kevin McCarthy’s ongoing revenge tour against the Republicans who voted to defenestrate him in October. The two main targets, apparently, are Nancy Mace and Bob Good, who have approaching primaries. A McCarthy-allied group has deployed ads against them both, as well as Eli Crane, whose primary election will take place later in the summer. So far, Mace has raised four times as much as the McCarthy-blessed candidate, Catherine Templeton, ahead of South Carolina’s June 11 primary. The following week, on June 18, Good will face state senator John McGuire in the Virginia Republican primary. While Good has maintained the upper hand in fundraising, it’s by a margin of only $350,000.
• Gonzales under pressure: Over in Texas, the statewide G.O.P. conflict has also manifested in Rep. Tony Gonzales’s bid for a third term. The 43-year-old incumbent is facing runoff challenger Brandon Herrera and a slew of his right-wing allies. Gonzales has been largely unrepentant over his post-Uvalde gun control vote. He most recently went on national television and called Matt Gaetz “a scumbag”—and seems to be relishing the fight.

  Gonzales won this sprawling seat back in 2020 before redistricting, when it was expected to flip to Democrats. In other words: He’s not your average, sleepy incumbent. And so far, he’s run a formidable campaign, raising $3.7 million cycle-to-date. But I’ve been warned that the outside forces lining up behind Herrera are formidable. The runoff election will take place on May 28.

None of the members who opposed the bill went so far as to criticize U.S. support of Israel. Instead, the group of 21 largely characterized their decision as a protest against Speaker Mike Johnson for also allowing a vote to send $61 billion to Ukraine, especially without tacking on a border bill. But, of course, until recently, the notion of even one or two Republican members voting against Israel aid would have been unthinkable. The traditional Reagan- and Bush-inflected establishment views Israel as a crucial ally in the Middle East, while evangelical voters consider protecting Israel a religious duty. “It’s a matter of biblical morality that defending the Jews and blessing Israel is part of being a good Christian,” said Ralph Reed, the founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a prominent Christian activist.

But for a new generation of self-described “America First” lawmakers—a group that’s never read Kissinger and whose leader cited “Two Corinthians” as his favorite Bible verse —Israel has become political collateral, like everything else. “I don’t want to overstate saying that they represent the majority,” a Republican insider with ties to the House Freedom Caucus told me. “But these are sentiments that would not have even been fathomed five, 10 years ago. And now, they’re very much there.”

On Wednesday afternoon, a number of House hardliners tried to stop Johnson from advancing a bill that would codify the legal meaning of “antisemitism,” theoretically making it easier to prosecute as a hate crime. Among the ostensible objections to the legislation was the claim that an overly broad definition could be used against constituents who might believe, for instance, that Israel must be defended but that Jews are still going to hell. “Antisemitism is wrong,” Greene tweeted, “but I will not be voting for the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023 (H.R. 6090) today that could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.”

Then there is former Fox host Tucker Carlson, who recently interviewed a Palestinian pastor who accused Israel of repressing and killing Christians. The segment caused an uproar among more traditional conservatives who would never have associated with such a person, let alone given them a platform. An appalled Erick Erickson, the popular right-wing radio host, responded by labeling Carlson a “pro-Hamas” ally of “the terrorist-supporting progressives of the American left.” Carlson, of course, has been dabbling in antisemitic tropes for years, dating back to his time at Fox espousing the “great replacement theory,” his recent documentary painting Jewish billionaire George Soros as conniving to take over Hungary, and in a recent interview with Owens, claiming that pro-Israel donors to elite colleges were calling for “white genocide.”

Carlson typically got a pass for this sort of commentary at Fox, where he once had the highest-rated show on cable news, in part, perhaps, because his monologues rarely drifted into criticism of Israel. But the normalization of conspiratorial rhetoric by prominent conservative figures—two years before she was elected, Greene shared a video on Facebook featuring a Holocaust denier blaming “Zionist supremacists” for promoting “immigration and miscegenation”—has clearly lowered the bar for what is deemed acceptable or beyond the pale within the G.O.P. “These folks, they move the Overton Window steadily on the right,” said the pro-Israel advocate. “And I think it’s not that [antisemitism] wasn’t there” in the electorate to begin with. “It’s that it wasn’t in Congress.”

Recent polling of young Republicans suggests that support for Israel is not the make-or-break issue it once was for their parents. A Pew poll published last week found that, among Republicans aged 18-29, 24 percent said they’re unsure where their sympathies lie in the Israel-Hamas war, and another 24 percent said they side with both sides equally. The fact that one-half of the Republican Party’s future base is ambivalent about Israel, at least at this stage of their political evolution, is startling. Indeed, more than one-third of those young Republican voters said the U.S. should play no role in the conflict, including providing military or humanitarian aid. That’s a major change, considering that in 2018, a separate Pew poll found Republican support for Israel at an all-time high of 79 percent. (Nine percent of Republicans sympathized with neither Israelis nor the Palestinians, and 7 percent said they were unsure of whom to sympathize with.)

Historically, of course, a central pillar of the Republican coalition has been evangelical and born-again Christian voters, and a significant bloc of them adhere to dispensationalism, or the belief that supporting and protecting Israel is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ. It remains, in fact, a fundamental aspect of the religious right’s support of Israel, and was frequently cited during the rise of Reagan’s Moral Majority. Today, however, while younger Republican voters overwhelmingly identify as Christian, they don’t necessarily share their parents’ and grandparents’ specific beliefs. “[Young] people are less likely to be supporting Israel so that Jesus can come [back] one day,” noted the Republican insider, citing his conversations with younger conservative Hill staffers these days. (Indeed, young evangelicals across the board are growing less supportive of Israel by the years, per a Brookings study.)

Of course, Donald Trump remains strongly committed to supporting Israel—even going so far as to offensively conflate American and Israeli Jewish national loyalties, and to accuse Jewish Democrats of “hating Israel.” But Trump’s interest in Israel appears to be driven by more pragmatic considerations—electoral impacts, donor outreach, ideological alignment, etcetera—than by any religious philosophy.

The growing emptiness at the center of that political marriage of convenience may be having trickle-down effects in the culture, too. Unlike Reagan’s Moral Majority, Trump’s die-hard following—a group that isn’t particularly bothered, for example, by his unprincipled stance on abortion—is less prone to viewing the defense of Israel as a God-given duty. “One of the great mistakes that the left makes when characterizing Trump’s movement is to suggest that it’s overwhelmingly Bible-believing Christians,” a conservative writer told me. “It's actually people who go to church less who tend to vote for Trump.”