Ted Cruz vs Tucker Carlson: GOP Split Over Israel Goes Public

Ted Cruz is no longer treating this as a policy disagreement.

Sitting down with Patrick Bet-David on Tuesday, the Texas senator delivered his most direct broadside yet against Tucker Carlson, and the language was not the language of a foreign policy debate. It was the language of an exorcism.

"I think Tucker is the single most dangerous demagogue in America," Cruz said, according to clips posted by the PBD Podcast. He said Carlson has chosen to go to a very dark place, and that he is doing enormous damage.

Then the line that traveled: "Almost every show he does is attacking Israel, attacking Jews, and attacking Donald Trump." Cruz's verdict on that combination was blunt. It may be many things, he said, but it is not conservative and it is not American.

The rest of the indictment

According to accounts of the episode circulating online, Cruz went considerably further than the clips the podcast posted.

He is said to have argued that Carlson has become difficult to distinguish from Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the most prominent Israel critics in Congress, in terms of the content of his broadcasts. He pointed to episodes he characterized as sympathetic to Zohran Mamdani, Nicolás Maduro and Vladimir Putin, and to Carlson's treatment of Sharia law.

He also widened the target beyond Carlson, naming Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene as part of the same current.

And he made the argument that clearly worries him most. The problem, in Cruz's framing, is not what Carlson believes. It is that a very large number of young conservatives are listening, and are being taught to hate Israel, hate Trump, and eventually hate America. Antisemitism, he said, functions as a gateway drug to anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism.

The feud has a clear origin point: a nearly two-hour interview Carlson conducted with Cruz in June 2025, ostensibly about Iran and American regime-change policy.

Carlson released a clip in which he quizzed Cruz on Iran's population and ethnic composition. Cruz could not answer, and the exchange went viral as a humiliation. Cruz's response was to accuse Carlson of playing a gotcha game and to urge people to watch the full interview, in which, he said, Carlson attacked Trump, attacked the AIPAC lobby, and denied that Iran was trying to assassinate the president.

Since then the relationship has curdled into open warfare, running alongside the American campaign against Iran, which Cruz has defended and Carlson has attacked.

The March speech

The phrase Cruz used this week is not new. He deployed it in March at the Museum of the Bible, addressing a symposium on antisemitism hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition and National Review, alongside Senators Jim Banks and Tom Cotton and Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

There, Cruz said he had seen more antisemitism on the right in the previous 18 months than at any point in his lifetime, and described it as a cancer. He said he did not want to wake up in five years to find both major American parties unambiguously anti-Israel, and warned that if Carlson and his allies prevail, that is exactly what will happen.

He also announced his intention to confront Carlson directly rather than ignore him, and traced what he called Carlson's descent to a specific moment roughly a year and a half earlier, when Carlson began platforming academics seeking to revise the history of the Second World War.

Cruz's sharpest observation that day was comparative. He noted the gap between how Republican officials responded to the neo-Nazi streamer Nick Fuentes and how they responded to Carlson. Fuentes drew condemnation. Carlson largely did not.

Where Carlson actually is right now

The timing is not incidental. This week Carlson all but endorsed Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan who is calling for a complete American arms embargo on Israel including defensive interceptors, saying he would not vote for the Republican in that race under any circumstances.

That is a former Fox News primetime host, with one of the largest audiences in American media, backing the most stridently anti-Israel major-party Senate candidate in the country against a Republican.

Cruz's argument is that this is not a stunt or a one-off. It is a direction of travel.

Why the reaction split so hard

Predictably, it did.

One camp read Cruz as saying something a lot of Republicans have privately worried about for two years and have been unwilling to say into a microphone, particularly regarding the drift of the party's under-30 online wing.

The other camp read it as an Israel-first politician using the charge of antisemitism to shut down legitimate criticism of American foreign aid and military commitments abroad, and noted that Cruz reaches for the word whenever the subject is Israel.

That argument is not going to be settled by a podcast appearance. But it is now being conducted at full volume, by a sitting United States senator, against the most-listened-to voice on the American right.

For Israel, which spent decades treating Republican support as a fixed constant, that is the part worth watching.