Architecture, Objectives, and Failure

In the summer of 2026, a detailed picture emerged of a coordinated effort by the Israeli government to reshape American public opinion — particularly on the political right — through a digital influence campaign built around Brad Parscale, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager. Reporting by TIME, the Wall Street Journal, Axios, and Israeli outlets has since filled in most of the operation’s structure: who was paid, what they built, and why, according to Israeli officials themselves, it did not work. What follows draws on that reporting, along with the underlying Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings, to lay out the campaign’s architecture, its stated goals, its use of AI tooling, and its eventual unraveling.

The Contract and Its Growth

In September 2025, the global advertising agency Havas — acting on behalf of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs — hired Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, to run a US-focused messaging campaign. The initial FARA filing disclosed a rate of $1.5 million per month. Over the following months the disclosed value of the contract climbed considerably: filings showed it rising from $6 million to $9 million by December 2025, and subsequent reporting from the Wall Street Journal described the fuller scope of Israel’s Parscale-linked spending — including subcontractors — as being in the $45–50 million range. That figure is substantially larger than the compensation Trump-aligned consultants have typically received for representing other foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia, India, or Qatar.

The Parscale contract was itself only one piece of a much larger Israeli public-diplomacy expansion. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar had already secured a 20-fold increase in the Foreign Ministry’s “hasbara” (public diplomacy) budget for 2025 — $150 million above baseline —........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)