With the war launched by the U.S. and Israel on Iran unfinished, its aims unfulfilled and its costs multiplying, the blame game in America is already intense, and both U.S. President Donald Trump and Israel are in the crosshairs. Arch-isolationist Tucker Carlson, whose voice is now one of the most influential on the U.S. right, has turned the volume up in an interview with The New York Times, published on Saturday.

“My strong impression was that Trump was more a hostage than a sovereign decision-maker” in deciding to strike Iran, Carlson tells his interlocutor. So who took him hostage? “Benjamin Netanyahu and his many advocates in the United States,” Carlson continues, adding: “That’s slavery. That is total control of one man by another.”

Navigating between Carlson’s deliberate provocations, his savvy adoption of cross-partisan tropes, his straightforward lies and his strange references to supernatural forces is not easy. But emerging from this mix is a potential new paradigm about relations between the United States and Israel which should concern policymakers in D.C. and Jerusalem, as well as a reframing of the normative boundaries of political debate, with repercussions for U.S. Jews as well.

More conspiracy theories

Carlson’s charge that Israel’s prime minister took the U.S. president “hostage” or enslaved him – both deliberately weighted terms – is an extreme position in the rolling debate about whether Trump chose to jump into the Iran war or if Netanyahu pushed him.

It’s hardly a secret that Netanyahu was keen on an attack on Iran. Preventing Tehran from reaching nuclear capacity, by force if necessary, has been one of his few consistent stances over decades.

Advocates of the Netanyahu-in-charge position cite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s March comment that Israel’s preparations to attack Iran forced the president’s hand to avoid higher U.S. casualties. There’s no doubt Netanyahu made what The Times’ own reporters described as a “hard sell” to Trump, with a plan for regime change that senior officials called “farcical” and “bullshit.”

But the same is true for Trump, who has been pushing for aggressive moves against Tehran since the 1980s and who, since the Maduro abduction, has acquired a taste for the military interventions he once campaigned to end. Trump pushed back at Rubio’s comment, saying “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.” It was Trump, not Netanyahu, who posted last month that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Carlson’s “enslavement” claim supercharges Netanyahu’s agency while disempowering, or even infantilizing, the president of the United States. For Carlson, who had invested so much effort and reputation in backing Trump but failed to persuade him not to attack Iran – Netanyahu’s successful contra requires bigger words, a bigger explanation.

When he asks how a “foreign leader” could have “this level of influence” over a U.S. president, he isn’t looking for concrete political reasons; he is suggesting a conspiracy theory, a trope as old as Western history about the all-powerful and perfidious Jews.

Indeed, he already peddled, in early March, the conspiracy theory that Israel, in cahoots with the ultra-Orthodox Chabad movement, started the Iran war as cover to destroy Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, in order to rebuild the Jewish Temple.

There’s another aspect to Carlson’s inflation of Netanyahu’s influence, and it’s related to a particularly viral clip from the interview when we get to watch Carlson lie in real time. Carlson straight-up denies having queried if Trump was the Antichrist, and was promptly shown footage of him doing exactly that.

He also refers to a “supernatural component” to Trump’s ability to demand compliance from his officials, adding: “I think it probably literally is a spell.” If Trump is the Antichrist and/or has dark magical powers, then what nefarious forces must Netanyahu command in order to control him?

There are, of course, a plethora of non-conspiratorial, and justified, ways to attack Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving premier and most abject leader: From his refusal to take responsibility for Israel’s lack of preparedness for the Hamas attack of October 7, his serial obstruction of Gaza cease-fires to bring back more hostages alive and preventing the killing of over 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza and its almost complete destruction, to his mentoring and empowerment of the racist and genocidal Jewish far right, his entrenchment of Israel’s West Bank occupation and de facto support for settler ethnic cleansing and terror, as well as his ongoing assault on Israel’s teetering democratic institutions.

There are plenty of ways to oppose his Iran policies, in which all his years of rhetoric have boiled down to a complete absence of strategy and may lead to a wounded but more radical Iranian regime still in possession of enriched uranium and a finger on the blockade button for the Strait of Hormuz.

But none of that requires casting Netanyahu as a Jewish Rasputin who has taken Trump hostage.

And opposing the U.S. co-launching the Iran war (a position with which a majority of Americans concur) or opposing Christian Zionism or believing that America should reassess its relationship with Israel does not require inviting reinforcement from Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist, Hitler fan and antisemitic critic of Israel.

Carlson is asked by The Times about his 2025 softball interview of Fuentes, who has said “Jews are responsible for every war,” claims the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was overblown and has called for the mass execution of Jews. Carlson’s responses swing from minimizing baby talk (“I just think, like, OK, he said naughty things. … I’m naughty for talking to Fuentes”) to throwing back a classic, if grotesque, piece of whataboutism: “Is denying the Holocaust more important than killing kids [in Gaza]?”

Why does it matter if Tucker Carlson attributes unearthly powers to Netanyahu or the pro-Israel lobby? The simple answer is that it removes the debate about Iran, or Gaza, from the realm of political debate into the dangerous territory of an essentialist, existential, religious battle with strong antisemitic undertones. After all, Carlson has said the issue of Israel is “Old Testament versus New Testament,” the old particularist, tribal, vengeful Jews vs. universalist Christians argument. And that isn’t just a problem for MAGA.

There is growing common ground between the U.S. right and left regarding opposition to the Iran war, alongside deep skepticism about Israel’s value as a U.S. ally – and the cost (both monetary and moral) of the alliance.

When leading progressive Representative Pramila Jayapal posted in March that the U.S. has “let Israel force us into a forever war with grave consequences to American lives and taxpayers,” the language is indistinguishable from the Carlson camp (although she blamed Trump’s naivety for entering the Iran war, not his abduction by Netanyahu.) A record number of Democratic senators voted in mid-April to block U.S. weapons sales to Israel. Even the progressive pro-peace pro-Israel lobby, J Street, is calling for U.S. military aid to Israel to be phased out by 2028.

That’s why it was fascinating to see the “progressive-friendly” language Carlson used, constantly referring to the “real” issues of Americans, focused on economics, corruption and unemployment. And he has traction on the left.

In his running commentary on the The Times’ interview, the prominent and controversial left-wing commentator Hasan Piker, who has called Netanyahu “infinitely worse” than Hamas, agreed with Carlson that Trump launched the Iran war “at the behest” of Israel” and that the president is “unbelievably servile and unbelievably loyal” to Israel’s interests. And in relation to the powerful “puppeteers” whom Carlson says are blackmailing him to do their will, Piker’s take is: “Israel, Epstein files, blackmail. … It’s not that crazy of a theory.”

Both Democrats and Republicans need to decide whether they’ll lean into that common ground on Carlson’s terms, a horseshoe which comes with his conspiratorial baggage, Christian nationalism, anti-immigrant racism and anti-Jewish venom. Or to publicly reject any allyship, to focus on policies not metaphysics, and for accountability – for America’s leadership, and for Israel’s.