Bertrand’s May story, sourced to U.S. officials, reported that “the U.S. has obtained new intelligence suggesting that Israel is making preparations to strike Iranian nuclear facilities.” The point of leaking intelligence on Israel is, first, to make Jerusalem anxious by implying a wide and growing divide between Trump and Israel and to throw sand into the gears of the U.S.-Israel relationship and create distrust. More nefariously, they’re attempting to box in the president himself; if he then does what he says he’ll do, that will be evidence that the conspiracy theorists are correct and that the White House is in fact controlled by “neocons,” making Trump look like a stooge. If Trump changes course, they’ll applaud him for being far-seeing and independent-minded—i.e., adopting the worldview of the bipartisan U.S. foreign policy establishment, from Bush 43 to Barack Obama, that prioritizes the peace process and a “grand bargain” with Iran.

Early in May, The Washington Post, the central Russiagate clearinghouse, reported that Michael Waltz was moved out of his job as national security advisor because he “upset Trump after an Oval Office visit in early February by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during which the national security adviser appeared to share the Israeli leader’s conviction that the time was ripe to strike Iran.” Further, Waltz “appeared to have engaged in intense coordination with Netanyahu about military options against Iran ahead of an Oval Office meeting between the Israeli leader and Trump.”

So what if he did? The job of the national security advisor is to coordinate the president’s policies within the U.S. government and with foreign allies. Insofar as Trump has threatened to bomb Iran if it doesn’t abandon its nuclear program, Waltz would have simply been doing his job. The purpose of the story is revealed in the use, twice, of the word appeared—which means that the sources didn’t see or hear anything directly. The story was fed to the Post to dirty Waltz as a “dual loyalist” and to reframe the president’s relationship with Netanyahu as negative and inherently oppositional.

Meanwhile, the reality of the U.S.-Israel relationship has become increasingly difficult to ascertain beneath all the noise—fulfilling at least one aim of the op, which is to obscure and negate what Trump announces as policy. In an April 22 post on Truth Social, Trump wrote, “I’ve just spoken to Prime Minister of Israel, Bibi @Netanyahu, relative to numerous subjects including Trade, Iran, etc. The call went very well—We are on the same side of every issue.” But not if you read MAGA social media accounts or the anti-Trump media administration officials use to undermine Trump policy.

Last week, one unnamed U.S. official told Axios that Vice President J.D. Vance decided against traveling to Israel for fear of suggesting that the White House endorsed Israel’s campaign in Gaza, again implying a large and widening divide. But according to a recent statement from Netanyahu’s office, “President Trump expressed support for the objectives set by Prime Minister Netanyahu: to secure the release of all our hostages, to eliminate Hamas, and to advance the Trump Plan”—which is, transferring all Palestinians out of Gaza.

So who is telling the truth about what Trump believes about the Middle East—longtime enemies like the Koch network, Cindy McCain, and CNN, or President Donald Trump himself? The question seems absurd. Yet Trump’s insistence on giving power to people in his administration who coordinate messaging with his enemies in the media and political establishment makes it hard to know.

Maybe Tucker Carlson is right to warn that war with Iran would be the equivalent of World War III. Sure, the Israelis have destroyed Iran’s air defenses and degraded its deterrence capabilities in their campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah, but maybe it won’t be easy to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. Sure, Trump was elected to fix the U.S. military and return its focus to war-fighting from climate change activism and the trans agenda. But if he’s controlled by neocons, as Carlson says, then he can’t fix those problems, because the bigger problem is the Jews.

And yet Donald Trump said that the problem was the swamp. He said that the ruling establishment had betrayed Americans by shipping off our manufacturing base to China and impoverishing the middle class. He said Americans are poorer today because the corporate bosses paid the political elites to flood the country with cheap foreign labor. He said we can’t win wars anymore because our military leadership is lousy. He said Europe keeps taking advantage of us and no president has been willing to call them to account—we pay billions to defend them, and in exchange, they keep us out of their markets. We pay to protect Europe, so their kids get good cheap college education from some of the best universities in the world, while our kids have to take on debt by age 19 to go to college, and even then all the places are taken by rich foreigners who spy on our research labs, burn American flags, and chant death to the Jews.

You can put it on a podcast, but it’s the same energy that motivated town criers throughout the Middle Ages: Our harvest is spoiled, our wells are empty, and who is to blame? But American lives were upended not by metaphysical evil or even natural catastrophe. Specific people and institutions made deliberate choices that degraded our public life, from Russiagate and the plot against Trump to COVID-19 and the erosion of political norms and the rule of law, all culminating with the installation of a half-demented president sustained by a corrupt political class determined to break the will of the American public in order to maintain its own privileges and profits. Trump was elected to hold the line and give Americans a chance to get back on their feet and make America great again, not to implement the failed policies of his predecessors while allowing lunatics to mainstream conspiracy theories and incite hatred.

This is MAGA’s second chance, owing to a miracle in a field in Pennsylvania. Forfeiting our blessing to test fate seems unwise.