In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

In an early sign that evangelical leaders are planning for a post-Trump future that doesn’t include Vice President JD Vance, Christian Broadcasting Network reporter and well-known evangelical whisperer David Brody is planting some seeds for 2028 on behalf of Mike Huckabee, the current U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Writing at All Israel News, a site run by Joel Rosenberg, a fervent Christian Zionist known for his apocalyptic-minded books and right-wing television broadcasts, Brody gives some oxygen to the presidential prospects of the 70-year-old former pastor, Arkansas governor, Christian broadcaster, and twice-failed presidential candidate. Brody writes that he was inspired to explore a Huckabee candidacy by the Christian nationalist organizer David Lane, who wrote in a newsletter he sends to 70,000 pastors: “We’ll throw Mike Huckabee’s name in the hat for 2028.” Based on that suggestion, Brody proceeds to make the case that Huckabee, for reasons of political experience, affable temperament, and theological commitment to America’s relationship with Israel, might just be the one to bring MAGA’s anti-Israel contingent together with its zealously pro-Israel Christian Zionists.

In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Following his attendance at the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and a meeting with President Trump about the Iran War, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with evangelical leaders at the historic Blair House in Washington last Wednesday. Among the participants were Christian Zionist leader Mike Evans; Larry Huch, a televangelist deeply embedded in the Christian Zionist world; MAGA evangelical influencer Lance Wallnau; and broadcaster Erick Stakelbeck, whose dispatches from the Middle East can be seen on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) and YouTube. Evangelicals and Jews, Netanyahu told the assembled group, are part of the same “Judeo-Christian heritage” that is “under attack from the rising tide of antisemitism and anti-Evangelicalism.” Our enemies, his message was, are the same. “It’s not accidental that the two are coming under a joint attack,” Netanyahu said, “because we are one.”

They are one, Netanyahu’s evangelical supporters believe, in a war not against the far-right antisemites and anti-Zionists who have both defined and rocked Trump’s coalition, the ones who admire Hitler and engage in Holocaust denial. The true enemy, they contend, are Israel’s critics on the left. Similarly, critics of Christian nationalism are, in evangelical thinking, solely from the left. They conflate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism, and criticism of an American theocracy with anti-Christian bigotry.