Neocons are taking advantage of the neo-McCarthyism Donald Trump has stoked against pro-Palestinian activists on the left to go after more antiwar voices on the right in his own administration. Such witch hunts never stop at their original targets.
The trouble with McCarthyism is that once it gets going, it has a habit of ensnaring figures who were not meant to be its original targets. We’re seeing this with the Donald Trump administration’s and broader right-wing crackdown on speech criticizing Israel, which yesterday was used to fire one of the administration’s own foreign policy picks.
Yesterday the news that Lt. Col. Daniel Davis had been dropped from his planned appointment as a deputy director of national intelligence (DNI) came as swiftly as the news that he had been offered and accepted the job in the first place. Davis — a senior fellow at Defense Priorities and a prominent conservative commentator on the pro-restraint side of the foreign policy divide — came under attack by pro-Israel voices as soon as the news of his hiring went public, focusing on his record of criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization whose mission is meant to be combating antisemitism, warned that Davis’s appointment would be “extremely dangerous” but pointed only to his views on Iran policy and US support for the war on Gaza — not anything antisemitic.
“Wow. So bizarre. Fighting anti-Semitism like never before but installing this guy,” tweeted conservative commentator Mark Levin. “Before you comment, go online and dig into his views and more. Hard to understand this pick by [DNI Tulsi] Gabbard.”
Both shared a Jewish Insider story that broke the news about Davis’s hiring, which warned of a “growing series of appointees in key positions across a number of national security agencies who fall far outside of the mainstream on Israel and Middle East policy,” specifically citing the think tank that Davis and several other appointees had worked for before joining the administration. That story featured a laundry list of Davis’s supposedly disqualifying statements, including calling US support for the Gaza war “a stain on our character as a nation” and saying that the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict predated the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7 two years ago.
If the Trump administration was committed to fostering peace and pulling the United States back from onerous overseas commitments, then Davis would have been a strong pick. A twenty-one-year military veteran who served four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Davis first rose to prominence by courageously blowing the whistle on the chasm between what Obama-era US officials were telling the public about progress in the Afghanistan war and what was actually happening on the ground, and supporting US withdrawal from the country.
Since then, as a Defense Priorities fellow, Davis has repeatedly advocated for restraint-oriented foreign policy positions. While backing US military aid to Ukraine, he was also one of the first and loudest voices to prophetically argue that battlefield realities didn’t favor the country and that a negotiated settlement was in its best interests, even if it meant ceding some territory. He has criticized former president Joe Biden for taking steps in the conflict that risk a direct US-Russia war and even nuclear exchange, is a critic of NATO expansion and its role in sparking the war, and has urged against offering membership in the alliance to Ukraine.
On the matter of China and Taiwan, he has argued against fighting a war over the island nation and for a policy of building up US defense to deter a future Chinese attack on US soil instead. He has been in favor of negotiations with North Korea, of pulling US troops out of Africa and Syria, and backed Trump’s controversial pick of Tulsi Gabbard as DNI. He has also backed a cease-fire deal in Gaza that would end Israel’s war there and foster broader peace and stability in the Middle East.
All of these are positions that Trump himself has come around to voicing at various points. And indeed, Davis himself has quite openly been a supporter of Trump. So how is it that Davis has ended up dropped from Trump’s administration?
The answer is that Davis has been caught up in something of a civil war between conflicting factions of Trumpworld. As neoconservative commentator Eli Lake wrote earlier this year, there was unease among more hawkish elements of the GOP that Trump was giving entrée to “a rising faction within the party that will weaken America’s global standing” — meaning their foreign policy arguments were alarmingly “almost identical to the arguments that Obama made in the early 2010s for pivoting away from the Middle East and Europe toward Asia.”
Jewish Insider, whose founder and publisher sits on the board of the ADL, has often been the vehicle for attacks on pro-restraint appointees like deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East Michael DiMino — the target of numerous attacks from the publication — as well as senior advisor to the secretary of defense Dan Caldwell, both of whom were Davis’s colleagues at Defense Priorities.
Also in the crosshairs was Elbridge Colby, nominated to serve as the Pentagon’s under secretary of defense for policy, a China hawk who has urged a more dovish line on the Ukraine war. For all of them, their positions on the Middle East — specifically, that the United States has limited interests in the region and should pull back, and that a US attack on Iran would be a bad idea — have been central to their opponents’ attempts to torpedo them.
Whether you agree or disagree with one or more of their foreign policy positions isn’t the point. The point is that there is a genuine rift among pro-Trump figures on foreign policy, and the more hawkish side has repeatedly used their less hawkish opponents’ skepticism of US policy on Israel — and now, in Davis’s case, even resorting to thinly veiled accusations of antisemitism — as a way to have them blocked or fired, in the hopes of tilting the administration’s foreign policy in a more pro-war direction in all theaters, not just the Middle East.
It’s not a coincidence that this pressure campaign has only borne success now, with Davis’s appointment. The abrupt U-turn on his hiring comes at the exact time the Trump administration is ramping up McCarthyist-style attacks on antiwar and pro-Palestine activists on the political left, most radically with its recent arrest and possible deportation of permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil.
Yesterday marked another win for this pro-war faction: after news broke that the Trump administration was taking the unprecedented step of negotiating directly with Hamas for a five-to-ten-year-long cease-fire deal, angering Israeli officials and driving them to try and sabotage the talks, there were howls of outrage among the pro-war right. As a result, Trump moved to quell the outrage by removing his special envoy for hostage affairs, Adam Boehler, from negotiations. Among Boehler’s sins, Jewish Insider pointed to public comments dismissing Israeli officials’ concerns, asserting that the United States was “not an agent of Israel,” and that there may be more negotiations with Hamas in the future.
Neoconservative critics of the “pro-restraint” faction of Trumpworld are clearly emboldened by his own administration’s attacks on the Left to now target their ideological enemies on the right. Having finally tasted success, these efforts will likely only expand. The growing neo-McCarthyite climate in the United States, whoever its targets were at first, is a threat to everyone’s rights — not just those on the left.