And given the choice between Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, who do you think Trump will choose?
It’s clear that Netanyahu lost personal favor when he congratulated Biden on his victory in 2020.
~Max
Indeed - Trump neither forgives nor forgets. If Trump is re-elected, and Bibi is still in power next January, Israel is screwed.
Naw…
Lessons from Trump’s presidency
Though Trump has sent mixed signals about his views of the war, his policies as president unambiguously favored Israel.
During his presidency, Trump moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, in a reversal of longstanding US policy. He also slashed funding to the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees and closed the Palestinians’ diplomatic mission in Washington. - What would Trump’s Israel-Gaza policy be if he were re-elected?
That was then. The world has changed quite a bit since he left office. Or do you disagree?
I disagree that Trump would support Gaza and ditch Israel.
That article was written yesterday and an assessment of what Trump would do if he became president again.
Ah, I see, thanks; the line about “actively urging other countries to resume funding” confused me.
Well, that’s the party line, at least. AFAICT a lot of the NATO countries are pretty unenthusiastic about the Gaza attacks.
If you can quote selectively fro the article, so can I:
Yet moments later, he appeared to agree with his supporters when they began chanting “Genocide Joe” – a term more commonly invoked by activists protesting against Biden’s abiding support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians and pushed the territory to the brink of famine.
“They’re not wrong,” the former president said, as he stepped away from the lectern and let them chant. (His campaign did not respond to a request for clarification on the remark.)
More than six months into the ruinous Middle East conflict, amid fears of a wider regional war, Trump has offered plenty of criticism – of Biden, his successor and all-but-certain rival for the White House, and of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister – but few details on what he might have done differently.
Trump’s relative silence leaves major questions about how he would act if he were to inherit the conflict in January.
His campaign did not directly respond to a list of policy questions, among them whether he supports a ceasefire, how he would handle hostage negotiations, whether there are any circumstances under which he would consider conditioning aid to Israel and whether he supports a two-state solution, an idea some of his former advisers categorically reject.
Yet in his muddled commentary, observers see the same motivations that shaped his first-term foreign policy: personal grievance and political opportunism, as discontent with Biden’s management of the conflict threatens to hurt the president’s re-election bid.
Trump v Netanyahu
When Trump was president, he forged a close, mutually beneficial relationship with Netanyahu. But his feelings for the prime minister reportedly soured after Netanyahu congratulated Biden on his 2020 election victory, which Trump baselessly claims to have won.
Days after the deadly Hamas attack on 7 October, Trump criticized Netanyahu and Israeli intelligence for failing to anticipate and stop the invasion. He also referred to Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon that Israel has been clashing with on its northern border, as “very smart”.
The former president’s rebuke of Netanyahu**,** as his country reeled from what the prime minister said was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, drew unusually sharp denunciations from fellow Republicans, including many of his challengers for the party’s presidential nomination.
The article is a lot less clear-cut than you say. I agree that Trump won’t lift a finger to help the Gazans, but he will significantly reduce American support of Israel - when he isn’t directly delivering its military secrets to Russia and Iran.
As an Israeli, I am very much rooting for Biden next fall.
Your contention is Trump is mad Bibi congratulated Biden in 2020? That’s your basis that Trump will dump Israel?
I’ll stick with my assessment (and others). Trump is a wild-card, to be sure, but our best guess on what he will do is what he has done which is support Israel and dump on the Palestinians.
No, my contention is that Trump is Putin’s bitch, and Putin is Israel’s enemy.
Trump doesn’t care about Israel one way or another because he doesn’t care about anything other than himself one way or another.
Eh…Netanyahu will promise Trump some prime Mediterranean beach front property in Gaza with some good tax breaks and a nice donation and they’ll be best buds again.
Yeah. That is - no offence - bullshit.
We had all sorts of arguments over the emoluments clause on this board in Trump’s first term and it turned out to be toothless and not enforceable. Trump made lots of money selling influence. Shit, it’s Trump-101. It’s what he does.
If you think Trump can’t find a way to enrich himself as president you have not paid attention.
Protip: Israel’s stopping the massive destruction in Gaza seems like it would definitely help Biden’s chances.
Yeah, I don’t see Trump staying mad at a powerful “he-man” type leader who flatters him. And he has no real conception of diplomatic strategy, nor does he perceive any problem with courting flattery and favor from two different world leaders just because said leaders are each other’s enemies.
Yes, I’m sure that Trump would have no qualms about fecklessly spilling Israeli military secrets to Putin, but if it’s any comfort, I’m sure he’d be equally ready to spill Russian military secrets to Netanyahu.
None of that is in any way excusing or minimizing Biden’s failures, of course, but let’s not pretend that Trump isn’t in a class of his own when it comes to promoting chaotic evil through sheer narcissism and stupidity.
And Putin can match any offer Bibi makes and multiply it by 100.
Hopefully we’ll win the war by then.
Well, I suppose it depends on how one defines “winning”.
You may not have seen it at the time, but Mr. Trump’s response to the October 7 attacks was, and I quote the straight dope,
Excerpts from Donald Trump's Speech, October 11, 2023
Middle East. We were peace, we had peace and I fought for Israel like no president in history. But then crooked Joe Biden came along and tossed Israel to the bloodthirsty jihadists. That’s what happened. He gave them. No, he wouldn’t even call up the Prime Minister. They called him. It’s a very sad thing when you look at what happened, what a difference a president makes. Isn’t it incredible? Just a president? What a difference? The savage attacks on Israel happened for three reasons. Biden loosened my tough sanctions on Iran and allowed them to sell massive amounts of oil making them $80 billion a year. Congratulations. They were making nothing with us. They were going to make a deal we would have had to deal with one week after the election. They were desperate, they wanted to make a deal. The US then gave Iran just a few weeks ago, $6 billion as ransom money. You know that. Right. Five people, good deal. This is the way we deal. They get five hostages, we get five hostages. I said all right there. Plus they get $6 billion. That’s not a good deal, is it? And it’s used for exactly what you’re watching right now on television and reading in the papers under my leadership. Arran was weak and broke and desperate for love. They wanted love, they were weak and they were broke and now they’re rich as hell. They got hundreds of billions of dollars and you have a whole new country and they are probably 90 days away from having a nuclear weapon. And we have a man who is grossly incompetent who can’t put two sentences together and he’s the one that’s leading our nation in talks. In fact, until just a little while ago, he was getting absolutely decimated. He never even mentioned the word Iran in any of his talks, didn’t want to talk about it, but nobody under me was allowed to buy oil. I told China they were the biggest purchaser of oil in Iran. I said, if you buy oil, any oil from Iran, we’re never doing business. You have all the stuff that you take out of this country and rip us off. We’re not going to do any more business with China. They stopped immediately. No more oil. I said it to India. I said it to many different countries and they went way down, way, way down and they had no money and they wanted to talk and they wouldn’t have done anything. […]
[…] And then two nights ago, I read all of Biden’s security people. Can you imagine national defense people? And they said, gee, I hope Hezbollah doesn’t attack from the north because that’s the most vulnerable spot. I said, wait a minute, you know, Hezbollah is very smart. They’re all very smart. The press doesn’t like when they say, you know, I said that President Xi of China 1.4 billion people, he controls it with an iron fist. I said he’s a very smart man. They killed me the next day. I said he was smart. What am I gonna say? But Hezbollah, they’re very smart and they have a national defense minister or somebody saying, I hope Hezbollah doesn’t attack us from the north. So the following morning they attacked, they might not have been doing it. But if you listen to this jerk, you would attack from the north because he said that’s our weak spot. Whoever heard of officials saying on television that they hope the enemy doesn’t attack in a certain area now unless it’s a con job. But you know what a con job is, you’re waiting there ready. You want them if you want them, but they weren’t right. They weren’t ready. You know, say what you want. Israel was not ready. This was a big surprise. This was a terrible thing that happened, they weren’t ready but if you wanted them to attack because you’ve got a million people there with guns and you’re going to blast the hell then you do. Exactly. But they didn’t have that, they didn’t have that Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan even bragged just days before the attack that the Middle East seems to be quite quiet. That was good. They really, they really, honestly, what they’ve done. It’s a shame you look at the world with all of the problems in this world. We had, we had a country, we had no inflation. We had no Russia and Ukraine. We had no Israel problems. We had the strongest economy in history. We got you the biggest tax cuts in the history of our country. Think of the biggest regulation cuts. We had the most people employed. We had something that nobody else. We had something that nobody else had ever done. We had one of the most successful presidencies in history. We rebuilt our entire military. We didn’t have Afghanistan. I was taking them out, but we’re gonna be taking them out with dignity and with pride and tremendous success. Instead, it was the worst. Probably the most embarrassing day in the history of our country. The press doesn’t talk about it. The media doesn’t talk about it, but we talk about it the most embarrassing day in the history of our country. Crooked Joe must take back and freeze the $6 billion right now. Take it back and freeze it. Joe, freeze it. Joe. You dumb person, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb person. Freeze that money, Joe. He doesn’t know what the hell money I’m talking about. Freeze it. You know, it’s not too late because supposedly it’s doing a transfer and that takes a little while he can freeze the damn money. What they did is unacceptable. In addition, Biden must immediately halt all funding to corrupt Palestinian entities that support these savage terrorists. Which if you remember, I stopped it because we were paying them about $750 million a year to the Palestinians. And they were really nasty. They were saying that death to America, death to America. And I heard about this, I said, are we actually paying them money? Yes, sir, we have for many years, sir. How much about 750 million to the Palestinians? That’s a lot. And I said, if they say anything again, we immediately stop it within about two minutes. They happen to say something, you know, death. We want death for America, we want death for Israel. And so I stopped the money and we would have had to deal with them too because I stopped the money. And I said, until we have a deal, I’m not negotiating and I moved, I moved the embassy that set him off a little bit. But uh they were ok with it. You know, remember when I did that. Every president promised they were gonna put the embassy in Jerusalem every single for decades and decades. Clinton said it. Bush said it. Everybody said it. Nobody did it but me, nobody did it. But me because, you know, I was called, once I got to office and once they heard we were even thinking about it. I was called by every leader in the world practically. Please don’t do it, sir. Especially in a certain part of the world. Please don’t do it. They said please, sir, do not do it. So what happened is, uh I went out and I got a lot of calls from heads of state, from kings, from presidents, from prime ministers because they heard I was going to do it. So I said, I don’t like telling people. No, tell them I’ll call them back on Monday and they call up the head of, I don’t want to use any names. The head of a big powerful country is calling, sir. Wants to talk to you about that deal about the embassy going to Jerusalem because you know it was, I could see why the other presidents didn’t do it because it was tremendous pressure. I said, tell him I’ll call him back. This was on a Thursday. I’ll call him back on Monday at, sometime in the afternoon. And uh I had about 15 people. I had to call back and on Monday morning, I approved it. Then I called her back. Hi, what’s going on? Hey, how are you feeling? Everything good. I called you about this but it’s too late, sir. You’ve already done it. Oh, sorry about that. Otherwise it would have been very tough and you know what? There was no problem with it. Everybody said, oh, it’s gonna be a dessert, no problem with it. But I kept my word. I said I was going to do it and I got it done. Larry. Right. So we got it done wasn’t in the games. And when I’m back in the White House, we will cut off every penny of Palestinian terrorists and they don’t even cut it off. They don’t cut the money if they keep paying them. It’s like with the World Health Organization […]
[…] But think what our country would have been like if the election had not been rigged and so on. Just think of this. Israel would not now be under attack would never be under attack. They’d be flourishing. They’d be happy. All of those people that are dead right now, dead beautiful daughters and sons, fathers and mothers, babies, 44 babies had their heads cut off. Did you hear that? Right. Babies, babies. These are babies. They had their heads cut off today, but Israel would be flourishing. They would have no problem. Iran would never have played that game.
Yes, it’s fun to make fun of politicians. But in this case Mr. Trump seems to have figured out (in his head) exactly what President Biden did wrong with regard to Israel and how President Trump would go about fixing it. Ditto for Ukraine.
Essentially his plan is to strong-arm China (by threatening another trade war) to strong-arm Iran (by threatening the oil trade) to stop funding Palestinian militants.
~Max
How? Short of writing Trump a big check what can Putin give Trump? (Unless Putin has kompromat on Trump but so far that has never materialized. Not to mention Trump seems immune to it. We have plenty of examples of Trump being a super-creep and his supporters love him for it and he seems to not give a shit about it either.)
Pardon the lack of clarity. I meant, I remember you saying somewhere that Biden had the election “in a bag” before his decisions on Israel, and thought the implication was that you thought he’d surely win if he supported Palestine and put real diplomatic and economic pressure on Israel.