The American left is so desperate to weaken President Donald Trump before the midterms that it is doing something absurd on its face: laundering extreme-right journalist Tucker Carlson into a serious foreign-policy authority and former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent into a principled witness against President Trump’s Iran war.

Media and political elites have tried to turn Carlson into the emblem of a MAGA rupture over Iran and to recast dissent on the right as proof that President Trump somehow betrayed his own base. That is not neutral analysis. It is an attempt to turn one factional quarrel into a broader story of presidential fracture.

The irony is brutal. For years, the left treated Carlson as reckless, toxic, and beyond the pale. But the moment he became useful against President Trump, he was suddenly granted seriousness, strategic weight, and borrowed legitimacy. When the left needs Tucker Carlson to weaken President Trump, it is not exposing him. It is exposing its own bankruptcy.

Joe Kent makes the spectacle even worse. He resigned from his post after supposedly opposing the ongoing military campaign in Iran and is now under investigation over alleged leaks of classified information before his resignation (which could explain his sudden change of posture). But the deeper embarrassment is not only the investigation. It is the reversal. After the General Soleimani strike in 2020, Kent publicly argued that the United States should wipe out Iran’s ballistic capabilities. The same man now being marketed as an antiwar truth-teller once argued for hitting Iran hard. He did not discover restraint. He “changed” posture.

That is the pattern. The left does not believe in Kent or Carlson. It uses them as propaganda weapons. And when President Trump is the target, almost any weapon will do.

This is why the left and the far right so often converge on foreign policy. They speak in different accents, but they keep arriving at the same destination: suspicion of American power, contempt for strategic burden, and hostility to Israel dressed up as moral clarity. One side calls it anti-imperialism. The other calls it restraint. Too often, both mean the same thing: America should pull back, Israel should absorb the blame, and hostile regimes should profit from Western hesitation.

That convergence is not abstract. It is habitual. The anti-Israel left and the anti-Israel right do not merely resemble each other from a distance. They keep meeting on the same ground. Carlson says the Iran war serves Israel more than America. The left, which spent years treating him as toxic, now recycles that line because anti-Trump utility matters more than geopolitical reality and ideological consistency. That is not a serious foreign-policy debate. It is a panic alliance held together by resentment, opportunism, and a shared instinct to blame the same ally while excusing the same enemies.

And it is a panic alliance because it requires selective blindness.

To sustain the claim that President Trump’s Iran war discredited him, critics have to minimize what it achieved. They have to downplay the pressure imposed on Iran, the damage done to its capabilities and proxies, and the basic fact that force was finally used where previous administrations specialized in delay, euphemism, and managed decline. The argument now is less about whether President Trump acted than whether he should be denied political credit for acting.

The same blindness appears closer to home. Pressure on Venezuela is brushed aside. What is unfolding in Cuba is minimized. The broader pattern is ignored: an administration willing to impose costs abroad instead of merely narrating threats. That does not fit the preferred storyline of chaos and collapse, so it is buried under moral posturing and media theater.

That is why the timing matters. Midterms are coming. The goal is not merely to criticize President Trump. It is to punctuate the command. It is to manufacture the impression that he fractured his own coalition, lost control of the foreign-policy ground that once distinguished him, and exposed weakness where he wants to project strength.

The party divide matters too. The Democratic Party is no longer merely home to criticism of Israel. Increasingly, anti-Israel politics has become part of its activist energy and ideological identity. That does not mean every Democrat is antisemitic, just as it does not mean every Republican is sound on Israel. It does mean the center of gravity is shifting.

In today’s GOP, anti-Israel and antisemitic elements exist and should not be dismissed, but they remain a faction rather than the organizing core. Nevertheless, in today’s Democratic Party, hostility to Israel is no longer just a fringe irritant. It is becoming more central, more tolerated, and more politically consequential, and will eventually end up in hate towards American Jews.

That distinction matters in a harder world.

Thus, this is not some noble antiwar revolt. It is a coalition of convenience driven by the need to wound President Trump before the midterms. The left launders Tucker Carlson’s image because it thinks he can weaken President Trump from the right. Joe Kent is repackaged as a man of principle even though he once argued for smashing Iran’s ballistic capabilities and now stands under investigation. The anti-Israel right joins in because, on the question that matters most, it keeps finding itself in rhetorical partnership with the same left it claims to despise.

That is not seriousness. That is opportunism under pressure.

And that is the real story. President Trump hits Iran. His enemies scramble to turn dissent into fracture, hypocrisy into principle, and media theater into strategy. Suddenly, the same people who once characterized Tucker Carlson as abominable are presenting him now as a statesman.

Not because President Donald Trump betrayed his base. Because his enemies are afraid he did not.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)