President Donald Trump’s aides had expected his supporters to celebrate the agreement. Instead, online influencers in Trump’s MAGA movement were excoriating it on social media. One shared an Israeli op-ed titled, “You Could Have Been the Greatest President of All—But You Failed.” Several posted the same video of Qatar’s prime minister appearing to snub Vice President J.D. Vance in Israel, arguing it showed regional powers dismissing the Trump Administration’s “naivete.” Others accused Trump of surrendering before achieving his stated objective of eliminating Iran’s nuclear program. Many of the posts appeared almost simultaneously, with similarities in language and tone.
Last September, the global ad agency Havas hired Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, to conduct a digital campaign on behalf of the State of Israel, according to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings reviewed by TIME. Under the agreement, Parscale’s operation would produce 100 original pieces of content each month, with at least 80% aimed at Gen Z audiences across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts. In a Services Agreement draft included in the filing, Parscale also pledged to amplify the campaign across social media and through “integration of narrative messaging into Salem Media Network properties and aligned distribution channels,” referring to the Christian conservative broadcasting and publishing company where he serves as Chief Strategy Officer. Parscale vowed the effort would produce at least 50 million digital impressions per month, as well as influence how AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini characterized Israel and the war. For all this, Israel agreed to pay Clock Tower X $1.5 million per month.
While Parscale acknowledges that the operation was intended to prevent young conservatives from drifting away from Israel, he says neither he nor his firms played any role in turning opinion against Trump's objectives. “I have never funded, organized, or participated in any effort to undermine President Trump—ever—including his MOU or ceasefire proposal,” Parscale tells TIME. “The claim that I am coordinating an effort to prolong the war is completely false. The only people manufacturing a conflict between President Trump, Israel, and me are anonymous officials using background quotes to make me the bogeyman.”
It remains unclear how much Parscale’s outfits paid creators as part of the Israel campaign. Another recent Influenceable campaign offered influencers a base payment of $2,250, plus $1 for every 1,000 views, up to 2 million views—allowing influencers to earn as much as $4,250 per post, according to internal text messages reviewed by TIME. People who participated—most of whom asked for anonymity, fearing reprisals—rejected the suggestion that there was anything improper about the practice. Parscale says none of the money from the FARA-registered contract has been used to pay influencers, arguing that doing so would require them to disclose the source of their funding. He says other Christian organizations hired his firms to support Israel in the wake of the October 7 attacks, but declined to identify them.
The Parscale-led effort continues, but neither the Trump Administration nor the Israelis appear happy about how it’s going. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had hired Parscale to improve the nation’s standing among conservatives, only to watch support continue to erode on the American right and across the broader U.S. electorate. "We are pissed at Brad Parscale," says the Israeli official familiar with the arrangement, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. "He was supposed to make things better. We have paid him lots of money. But what did he do with it? Things have only gotten worse." According to the Pew Research Center, favorable views of both Israel and Netanyahu have fallen since last year. Only 32% of Americans now view the Israeli government favorably, the lowest level in decades. In April, Pew found that Republicans with a negative view of Israel ticked up since last year, with 57% of young Republicans having an unfavorable view of Israel compared with 50% a year ago. Global antisemitic incidents, meanwhile, have surged 34% since the Iran war’s outbreak, according to the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Antisemitism Research Center.
Inside the White House, some officials were frustrated for a different reason. What had begun as an effort to keep the American right supportive of Israel, they believed, had evolved into an influence campaign that was colliding with the President’s political interests as Trump’s and Netanyahu’s war aims diverged, led by a figure trading on the perception that he remained close to Trump. They believed the very media ecosystem Parscale had promised to activate was now helping to circulate arguments that undercut Trump's effort to end the war. "We're talking about American influencers who are being paid by a foreign country, then trying to build momentum to change the President's view, or the views of others around him," says a senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. "It can't be dismissed as inconsequential by any means."
Brad Parscale had reinvented himself before. In 2016, he was the obscure digital operative who helped transform Facebook's advertising platform into one of the most potent political weapons in modern American history, using its targeting tools to help propel Trump's improbable victory. He took over as campaign manager of Trump's reelection campaign in 2020 before being jettisoned that summer.
By 2025, Israel needed exactly that. The military campaign that followed the October 7 attacks had evolved into something larger than a battlefield contest. Israeli officials increasingly believed they were losing an information war on TikTok feeds, Instagram reels, podcasts, YouTube videos, and, increasingly, inside the artificial-intelligence systems that millions of people now relied upon to explain the world. The erosion of support for Israel had spread within the American right, where influential voices including Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon had become openly skeptical of Netanyahu.
By last fall, Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs had concluded that its conventional public diplomacy efforts—known in Israel as hasbara—were woefully insufficient. The Israelis worried about the influence of Carlson and Bannon and the suspicion taking hold among young conservatives that Israel exercised hidden control over America’s foreign policy, according to the Ministry official, and they feared Vance and his allies were steering the American right toward an isolationism fundamentally at odds with Israel's strategic interests. They wanted someone who understood the landscape of the internet and MAGA culture.
Parscale's plan was focused in part on influencing the sources from which AI chatbots draw information. The operation created websites, such as PaxPoint.org and FactSignal.org, that were designed less for human readers than for AI systems synthesizing information from across the web.
Sortor’s posts caught the attention of the U.S. official monitoring the online debate over Israel and Iran. Looking more closely at the conversation about the deal unfolding across the conservative internet, the official began noticing the same patterns: similar language appearing across seemingly independent accounts in rapid succession. “You have a person who is farming out this influencing task, who is being paid by a foreign element to the social media space,” the official tells TIME. “To me, this is a very, very dangerous thing.”
Israel is hardly alone in trying to shape American online discourse to its advantage. Governments around the world increasingly employ digital influence operations to shape public opinion and advance their national interests. Russia has used troll farms, fake social-media personas, and hacked materials to inflame political divisions in the United States, most notably during the 2016 campaign. Iran has relied on covert online networks and impersonation campaigns to amplify pro-Tehran narratives and target critics. China has expanded state-backed influence operations across Western social media. Foreign actors seeking to shape American debate online has become a feature of modern geopolitics, not an exception.
What made this case unusual, the U.S. intelligence official argues, was the target: not swing voters or the American public at large, but the President’s own political base. "It's important to recognize that if there's one Brad Parscale out there, there are others," the official says.
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