Shortly before Christmas, at the Turning Point USA convention in Phoenix, I spoke to a young conservative Christian about Israel’s war in Gaza. As I reported in UnHerd, he described how it had undermined his confidence in the MAGA agenda. Since Zoomers like him were getting so much of their news from TikTok and Instagram, he told me, they were seeing the carnage of the Palestinian population unfiltered. The atrocities they saw on their screen stood in tortured juxtaposition to the speeches they heard from politicians about the fundamental goodness of the state of Israel. That contradiction, in turn, appeared as a naked repudiation of the America First principles many of those politicians purported to uphold.

The sentiment echoed what Tucker Carlson had said on stage the night before. Carlson had spoken without equivocation about the immorality of “killing tens of thousands of children,” and how wrong the U.S. government was to support the army that had done it. Carlson, like most of the convention’s attendees, is Christian. The matter is as ethically straightforward to him as Jesus’ teachings in the Beatitudes. The chaotic history of the region, the dueling religious claims, the geopolitics of the Middle East, and the vilification of Palestinians could not obscure this plain moral fact. “Killing people who committed no crime is immoral,” he said, “and you are seeing now a very intense effort to convince you otherwise.”

Carlson isn’t the only former Trump cheerleader to see it this way. “I’m not for their foreign wars. I won’t say, ‘Kill everybody in Gaza,’” Marjorie Taylor Greene told a New York Times reporter for a recent story on her break with Trump. Greene has called Israel’s war a genocide.

Like Carlson, Greene is a Christian. The world, to her, is fundamentally a battleground of good and evil. Green’s falling out with the President has largely been over issues with the most basic fault lines between right and wrong, the kinds a child could recognize: genocide, the corrupting influence of tech oligarchs, and the cover-up of an international sex trafficking ring of minors.

Millions of Christian conservatives supported Trump because he was the tool available to them to enact their policy agenda, especially around abortion. They did not mistake him for one of their own. During his first term, liberals regarded the political movement around Trump as a cult of personality, just as conservatives had viewed the movement around Obama before him. But it was never so simple in either case. The coalition around Trump was forged in resentment of liberal elitism, distrust of the political establishment, conventional Republican politicking, the transactional support of corporate lobbies, and other factors. It held together as long as the President delivered for those various constituencies.

But Trump has never been a coalition-builder. He’s a political opportunist with sharp instincts for demagoguery. It should surprise no one that he has failed to juggle the competing demands of his variegated base. He doesn’t care to, because he regards their loyalty as his entitlement rather than something he’s obliged to earn. But their love is not unconditional.