Tucker Carlson flew to Ben Gurion Airport on Wednesday, interviewed US Ambassador Mike Huckabee for two and a half hours, and left without setting foot in Israel. The two sides immediately disputed what happened next, with Carlson claiming his producers were detained and interrogated and Huckabee calling him a liar. The post-interview spat is a sideshow, because the interview itself was the most revealing document yet of the fracture that will define the Republican Party’s next decade.

An exhausted-looking Huckabee found himself defending positions that once commanded automatic Republican applause but which now provoke confusion, or worse, from the party’s rising generation. He is a two-time presidential candidate, former governor of Arkansas, and the most openly Christian Zionist ambassador Washington has ever sent to Jerusalem. He has declared that Jews have a “divine right” to the land and denied Palestinian national identity.

Carlson knew all this and came prepared. When he asked whether the biblical covenant in Genesis 15, promising land “from the Nile to the Euphrates”, grants Israel the right to take the entire Middle East, Huckabee replied that “it would be fine if they took it all.” He later called this hyperbole, but the damage was done. When Carlson pressed him on the deaths of children in Gaza, Huckabee argued that many of the 14-year-olds killed were “Hamas operatives” or human shields, and that the IDF takes precautions that “no other country, including ours”, observes during urban warfare. Carlson’s reply was simple but effective: “Can you hear yourself?”

The interview covered ground no mainstream Republican interviewer has touched. Carlson asked why Huckabee met convicted spy Jonathan Pollard at the US Embassy in Jerusalem last July, a meeting kept off the official schedule which alarmed the CIA station chief and blindsided the White House. Pollard served 30 years for passing classified US documents to Israel and later labelled Donald Trump a “madman”. Huckabee called it a courtesy visit. Carlson asked why dozens of accused American sex offenders have found refuge in Israel, citing the case of Tom Alexandrovich, a senior Israeli cybersecurity official caught in a Las Vegas child predator sting who posted bail and fled the country. Huckabee had never heard of it.

Most of Huckabee’s answers hinged on a theological framework that shares little common ground with Carlson’s audience. When Carlson asked whether the Jews of the covenant are the same as the secular, Ashkenazi founders of modern Israel, or whether ethnic Jews who convert to Christianity lose their right of return (they do, under Israeli law), Huckabee could not produce coherent responses. His theology was never designed to withstand cross-examination.

For now, Carlson — the Episcopalian who reads the New Living Translation Bible every morning — appears to be winning the hearts and minds of younger members of the party’s base. A December 2025 IMEU/YouGov survey found that 53% of Republicans under 45 oppose renewing the $38 billion weapons agreement with Israel, and 44% would vote for a candidate who supports reducing weapons transfers. Pew’s October 2025 data showed that 41% of Republicans now hold an unfavorable view of the Israeli government, up significantly from prior years. At Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in December, Carlson told the crowd he and the late Charlie Kirk had discussed AIPAC’s influence in Kirk’s final months, and that “people are attacked for asking the question”. StopAntisemitism named Carlson its “Antisemite of the Year”. The split is open, personal, and accelerating.

Carlson’s most telling blow landed hard: “I’m mad at my lawmakers for not protecting my country with the care they’ve protected Israel.” Yet again, Huckabee had no answer. For years, he wouldn’t have needed one. The Christian Zionist consensus held for decades because it aligned evangelical theology with defense industry interests and Republican electoral strategy. Two of those three pillars have now crumbled as the older evangelicals age into irrelevance.

Only the donor money remains. Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American billionaire who gave $106 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign, has joined Paul Singer and John Paulson in funding a super PAC to unseat Representative Thomas Massie, a rare Republican who refuses AIPAC money. Trump endorsed Massie’s challenger, calling Massie a “true hater of Israel”. The question for 2026 is whether checkbooks such as Adelson’s can keep buying a policy the Huckabee types can’t defend, and which Carlson’s America First base no longer wants.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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