Foreign Affairs Foreign Affairs Israel Pays Evangelicals with Trump Ties to Create Pro-Israel Content The new “Esther Project” foreign influence campaign has been paying Pentecostal consultants with ties to Trump family members. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images) A new foreign influence deal aims to shape American public opinion to be more pro-Israel by paying influencers hefty sums to post on social media. The American Conservative reveals that some of the first payments from the so-called Esther Project have been to evangelical Christian consultants, one with links to former Donald Trump aide Brad Parscale, who runs a right-wing media company that’s partially owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Lara Trump. Other consultants paid by the firm come from a network of evangelical Christians in Trump’s orbit that have long been cultivated by the Israeli PR professional running the effort as a facet of maintaining support for Israel among American religious conservatives. The Esther Project is an influence campaign run by a company working for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to the firm’s recent disclosure with the Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA.) The September filings from Bridges Partners LLC, which mapped out a well-funded campaign, sparked rampant speculation about which pro-Israel American social media influencers might receive thousands of dollars to create pro-Israel content, as American popular support for Israel’s actions in Palestine continues to wane. Two new, similar campaigns from Israel’s Foreign Ministry have also been launched in recent months. One will pay a California company to “geofence” attendees at Christian colleges and churches in Western U.S. states to deliver them pro-Israel ads. Another effort will give Brad Parscale $6 million to use predictive AI to create pro-Israel media for Gen Z audiences.  But the Bridges Partners social media influencer campaign’s links to Parscale and evangelical Christian advisors have not yet been reported. Bridges Partners’ influencer campaign runs through Havas Media Group, a Germany-based organization. Bridges Partners LLC was formed in Delaware this June by two Israeli consultants, Uri Steinberg and Yair Levi. Steinberg worked for Israel’s Ministry of Tourism for a decade and was its North American tourism commissioner from 2014 until 2018. As commissioner, he partnered with various American evangelical groups, and as an independent consultant he worked, in his own words, “as a conduit between Israeli and American entities, helping them to connect with one other, primarily with the faith-based community.”  Steinberg also serves as director of CityServe Israel, a branch of California faith-based charity CityServe International that has worked with Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump several times and describes itself as a “collaborative network designed to help local churches create greater impact and offer hope in the name of Jesus. We mobilize the church to fulfill its purpose locally and globally.” Steinberg has long partnered with American evangelical leaders. In 2009, he even met with leaders of Kentucky’s Creation Museum, which promotes a literal belief in creationism and the events depicted in the Bible.  On Sept. 2, Bridges Partners paid the Matt Brown Group and Mark Forrester $7,880 and $2,000, respectively, for consulting. The Matt Brown Group is a Minnesota LLC that manages content for Matt Brown, an evangelist and author with 1 million followers on Facebook. The co-founder of CityServe International is Dave Donaldson. He posts often about Ivanka Trump’s support for his charity on X and hosts a podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network, which has featured both Steinberg and Matt Brown on another podcast on the platform. In 2021, Donaldson was on a call with national faith leaders when Trump, then exploring a run for reelection, announced the launch of a national faith advisory board to shore up his support among evangelical groups. Ivanka Trump partnered with CityServe and superstar televangelist and Donald Trump advisor Paula White on a charitable initiative in 2021. Trump has long enlisted White’s help to garner support from evangelicals, even as she’s been criticized for moves like selling $1,144 “resurrection seeds.” Paula White Ministries has worked with CityServe Israel and Steinberg himself as recently as 2024.  Matt Brown has written a column for an online Christian magazine owned by Salem Media Group—the Texas-based conservative Christian media conglomerate that owns a radio network, a streaming network, and the conservative websites TownHall, Redstate, and Hot Air. Trump’s 2016 digital media campaign director Brad Parscale was appointed chief strategy officer of Salem in 2025. Parscale is himself an evangelical Christian based in Texas. Donald Trump Jr. and his wife Lara Trump became stakeholders of Salem Media Group this year. Parscale is widely credited with helping Trump win in 2016 with his social media efforts as digital media director for that campaign. Brown has expressed his support for Israel for years, including in 2020 and 2024. It’s unclear what his consulting fee from Bridges is for, and if he will be helping to locate and manage social media influencers for paid pro-Israel posts. One Mark Forrester was also paid a consulting fee by Bridges as part of Project Esther. The Mark Forrester in the FARA filings appears to be the chief communications officer for a major Pentecostal denomination, Assemblies of God. Forrester has written for Matt Brown’s website and called Brown his good friend on Facebook. Steinberg also appears to have partnered with Forrester, tagging him in a post announcing a new Israel outreach program he launched in 2020, called Israel Campus. Israel Campus, he said, was the “first of a kind live online classes from Israel, delivered by top Israeli scholars in a variety of subjects relevant for Christians around the world.” Forrester has also previously participated in other Israel-evangelical American crossover outreach. Last year, he appeared on a podcast with the president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, Yael Eckstein. Eckstein’s podcast “Nourish Your Biblical Roots with Yael Eckstein” is also hosted on the Charisma Podcast Network. Charisma Podcast Network is owned by evangelical publisher Stephen Strang who once wrote a book about how Trump was divinely foretold to be elected and then reelected. “You have a lot of young people who are also exposed to the rise in antisemitism and demonizing Israel and the Jewish people. How have you seen the response, specifically from the younger generation of Assemblies of God to outwardly unapologetically standing with Israel in this post-October 7th world?” Eckstein asked Forrester, bemoaning what’s “happening on college campuses.” Forrester explained that support for Israel in Assemblies of God is based on the Bible, and spans generations.Emailed inquiries to Forrester, Brown and Steinberg were not returned.  Eckstein and Steinberg have both been honored as “BridgeBuilders”or “top activists in Christian-Jewish engagement” by Root Source, a Texas-based nonprofit “dedicated to promoting respectful relationships between pro-Israel Christians and Jews.” Assemblies of God is a large, international fundamentalist Pentecostal Christian church, and churchgoers believe in practices like speaking in tongues, faith healing, and prophecies. Along with other American evangelical groups, Assemblies of God has historically been part of a large and longstanding Christian Zionism tradition. But even the evangelical community is seeing a generational divide in attitudes toward Israel. Support among younger evangelicals for Israel began to wane even before the war in Gaza, religious scholar Matthew Taylor said. “It makes sense for Israel to reach out to American evangelicals,” he told The American Conservative, “since Christian Zionists make up a much bigger demographic than Jewish Americans, who are now very divided in support for Israel.” Steinberg’s co-owner of Bridges Partners appears to be Israeli Orthodox musician and former IDF captain Yair Levi, who appears in photos with Steinberg on Facebook. Bridges also paid law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, a firm that’s previously worked for Israeli spyware company NSO Group, and a woman in Israel working as a digital marketer for “Project Services.” A firm called Candor Marketing, Inc received $2,000 for “pre-payment for future content generation.” Candor Marketing, Inc, located in South Carolina, is owned by an evangelical Christian couple who previously participated in something called the Israel Collective, part of Christians United for Israel, the country’s largest Christian Zionist organization. A former employee of Uri Steinberg’s consulting firm, who also worked under him at the Israel Ministry of Tourism, worked as the group’s outreach and alumni development coordinator. Matt Brown also partnered with the Israel Collective and traveled to Israel several times with the group. Candor does social media management, content creation, and paid ad campaigns for clients like faith-based fitness trainers and Christian business coaches. Candor did not reply to messages.  So far, no social media influencers have been identified as being paid as part of the Esther Project, but these newly-identified vendors suggest they will likely be American evangelicals tasked with the uphill battle of boosting Israel’s popularity with young Americans. The post Israel Pays Evangelicals with Trump Ties to Create Pro-Israel Content appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Crime and Disorder Unleash Protests in Mexico But the government still maintains tight control over the political situation in the country. (Photo by ULISES RUIZ/AFP via Getty Images) Violent, black-clad demonstrators tore down security barriers in Mexico City last Saturday, using them as battering rams against lines of police guarding the National Palace at the capital’s famed Zócalo town square. In Guadalajara, rioters smashed windows and set fire to entrances of the state legislature. Thousands of peaceful protesters marched with signs and chanted: “Fuera Morena! Basta de inseguridad! Justicia para Carlos Manzo!” More than 100 police officers were injured and dozens of demonstrators arrested amid the chaos. The “Generation Z” protests, which kicked off the day after the gruesome public murder of popular independent mayor Carlos Manzo, are the first real token of resistance the government of Claudia Sheinbaum has faced during her term as president. Her political party, Morena, continues to hold a dominating position in Mexican politics at all levels, making her the obvious focus for popular discontent over Mexico’s continued issues with crime, corruption, and public disorder. Manzo’s death has been particularly damaging to Sheinbaum’s image as a crimefighter and enemy of the cartels. Manzo was originally a member of Morena, but left the party to contest the mayorship of the city Uruapan as an independent. A charismatic figure easily identifiable by his characteristic broad-brimmed hat, Manzo swept to the mayor’s office on a platform of mano dura against the cartels, which have ravaged Uruapan and the larger state of Michoacán.  The new mayor publicly broke with Sheinbaum over security matters. Manzo sharply criticized her stated adherence to her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “hugs not bullets” security strategy, instructing his own police forces to dispatch any armed criminals that attacked the public or attempted to resist arrest. In turn, Sheinbaum in October pulled out 200 National Guard troopers that had been stationed in the city, leading Manzo to protest that the federal government was leaving the city “vulnerable in the face of the illegal activities of organized crime” and adjuring the president not to “leave Uruapan alone in the fight against federal crimes which are the responsibility of the federal government to manage.” That decision has come back quickly to haunt Sheinbaum’s government. On November 1, Manzo was shot seven times by an assassin while attending the city’s annual Day of the Dead celebration. The public has not been tardy in connecting Manzo’s criticism of Sheinbaum and her decision to pull troops out of the city with his death. Rumors have circulated online that Manzo was actually murdered on Sheinbaum’s orders through corrupt connections with cartels—a perennial suspicion in a country thick with corruption and assassinations. The murder served as a catalyst, galvanizing various groups frustrated with the Sheinbaum administration’s handling of organized crime and with the continued futility of Mexico’s national struggle against corruption. The next day, protestors gathered in Morelia, the capital of Michoacán, to demonstrate against cartel crime and Morena. Agitators broke into the state government’s executive mansion and began throwing furniture out the windows and attempting to light the building on fire.  Other groups began organizing similar marches and demonstrations across the country. The Mexican opposition, including figures from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the National Action Party (PAN), seized on the discontent and began promoting the protests on their social media channels as well, leading Sheinbaum and her allies in Morena to denounce the protests as an astroturfed operation by the Mexican “far-right.” The movement culminated in the grand protest in Mexico City on November 15, which gathered around 17,000 demonstrators and ended in the violent clash with Mexican police on the steps of the National Palace—no massive popular mobilization, but a notable outbreak of serious unrest and frustration with the still-popular Sheinbaum administration. The movement has briefly put Morena on the back foot and allowed the Mexican right to take the position of protagonist, a desperate necessity for the PAN and PRI, which have been so thoroughly routed by Morena during the past decade that they are teetering on the brink of political irrelevance. Both parties have clearly taken the message to heart, and are refocusing their attacks on the administration in the language of corruption and crimefighting. Morena has a number of scandals of its own that have diminished its credibility as a champion of anti-corruption: the close relationship between high-ranking Senator Adán Augusto López and a cartel leader involved in a military fuel theft scandal; the revelation that former president López Obrador’s sons were traveling abroad to luxurious resorts while their father lectured the nation on the principle of “republican austerity;” and the conspicuously rapid enrichment of officials across the party. Such scandals have eroded the party’s position as an anti-establishment insurgency attacking the ill-gotten gains of PRI and PAN politicians. So far, the attacks have yet to make a major dent in the image either of the president or her party: Morena is still the most positively viewed political force in the country, and vastly more popular than either of its principal rivals. Nor is the frustration evoked by Manzo’s death likely to last much longer; the protests have already begun to fizzle out. But the stage has been set for politics in Mexico going forward: Sheinbaum and her allies will continue to face pressure on crime and public order as the Mexican right hopes to capitalize on discontent with Mexico’s deep-seated cartel problems, while having to combat the perception that the party has become corrupt and self-serving—a fate that has inevitably befallen all ruling parties in the country through the present day. If Sheinbaum does not find a way to manage public order and her party’s accumulating corruption scandals, Morena may soon find itself with larger problems than a few thousand protestors in the heart of Mexico City. The post Crime and Disorder Unleash Protests in Mexico appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Where Does Trump’s Farewell Tour Leave the GOP? The president is focused on legacy-building, which makes for bad electoral politics in the here-and-now. When President Donald Trump returned to office in January, he immediately benefited from serving a nonconsecutive term. He and his team hit the ground running, matching first-term energy with second-term experience. An American president hadn’t served nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland 132 years ago, so what Trump was doing was without precedent in the modern political era. There was no telling how it would go. Over time, some of the downsides of this unusual situation, at least from the perspective of the MAGA movement and the broader Republican Party, have become apparent. The second term is a legacy term and Trump—who has now admitted the 22nd Amendment bars from seeking a third term and been briefed by GOP congressional leaders about the virtual impossibility of changing that in time for the 2028 election—has devoted more time to that than the types of things that would help an incumbent win reelection. Unlike in his first term, Trump hasn’t really spent much time barnstorming the country. He stayed off the campaign trail in this year’s elections (although that may have been in an effort to help Republican candidates in places like Virginia and New Jersey, where he did not win even at the peak of his political comeback). But he has traveled to foreign countries. First-term Trump talked a lot about the economy, until the pandemic—and the ruinous establishment advice he largely heeded in attempting to mitigate its spread—wrecked it just in time for the 2020 campaign. Trump would have probably won a second consecutive term without Covid-19 and Anthony Fauci.  Trump has talked about it less, until recently. And when he initially started talking about it again, he was defensive about the economy’s performance under his watch, much like the former president Joe Biden. Trump has a case to make, even if he is prone to exaggerate it. Both things were true for Biden as well, and he simply wasn’t able to alleviate voters’ concerns about inflation and the high cost of living by pointing to incremental improvements or other, better economic data points.   Democrats don’t really understand what inflation is or what causes it, which is why they call the problem “affordability” and many of their proposals for dealing with it are at least arguably inflationary themselves. But Trump has spent much of his time jawboning companies and the Federal Reserve while seeking quick fixes. At the same time, Trump decided to concentrate on his more transformational economic goals, including his sweeping tariffs agenda, rather than the immediate cost-of-living problems that won him the 2024 election. That is something a second-term president who isn’t seeking reelection would do. Trump’s first-term tariffs were smaller and more selective. They were also imposed during a period of genuinely low inflation. Maybe Trump’s grand vision will be vindicated. Maybe it won’t be. Reaganomics did not deliver in time for Republicans to salvage the midterm elections and nevertheless became Republican economic orthodoxy for more than 40 years. But these are still the priorities of a man who never expects to face the voters again, or to have another chance to restructure global trade for America’s benefit. And the plain fact is that voters are less convinced of Trump’s economic acumen than ever before. CNN political analyst Harry Enten points out that Trump is receiving some credit from voters for his focus on foreign policy. (Though George H.W. Bush’s single term in the White House is a grim reminder of how fleeting that can be when the economy is suspect.) But that only goes so far. Part of the reason Trump was assigned so much of the blame for a government shutdown the Democrats obviously caused was that he was so focused on international affairs. The reasoning went that if he can secure even a temporary ceasefire between the Israelis and Hamas in Gaza, surely he can strike a deal to reopen the government. Trump is seeking to end various wars to enhance his legacy as a peacemaker, but not in the way many of his voters imagined. In some cases, he wants to end wars by becoming (he hopes) modestly and temporarily involved in them. Again, maybe it will work, but we’ve heard of wars to end all wars before. For the most part, first-term Trump didn’t do this. If Republicans lose control of even just one house of Congress next year, foreign policy is all Trump is going to be able to conduct—when he isn’t fighting off impeachment inquiries.  Even the White House ballroom stuff is the sort of thing a president does with his future reputation, rather than his future electoral prospects, in mind. And while only the Trump-deranged will automatically assume this is proof he never intends to vacate the premises, it is a bit off-message when times are tough. Trump has never been focused enough on the political sustainability of his policies and actions, nor does he wear well with independents and suburbanites over time. For Vice President J.D. Vance and the rest of the party, that problem is magnified by the fact Trump himself won’t face the consequences at the ballot box. The post Where Does Trump’s Farewell Tour Leave the GOP? appeared first on The American Conservative.

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