Trump’s Israel Instincts Don’t Matter

To understand how Donald Trump might approach Israel in his second term, it’s worth revisiting the start of his first. A few weeks after the inauguration, Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington and received a surprisingly chilly reception. In a joint press conference, Trump told the Israeli leader, “I’d like to see you hold back on settlements for a little bit.” And after vowing “to make a deal” for Middle East peace, Trump declared, “As with any successful negotiation, both sides will have to make compromises.” He then looked at Netanyahu and said, “You know that, right?”

Trump’s comments reverberated widely, and Palestinians moved to seize the potential opening. In May, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas flattered Trump in a White House meeting by telling him that he could bring peace. David Friedman, Trump’s newly appointed ambassador to Israel and an avid opponent of a Palestinian state, began to worry. One of Abbas’s allies “informed the president that he needed to pressure Netanyahu and embrace Abbas in order to make a deal,” Friedman writes in his memoir, Sledgehammer. “Trump bought it.” Trump’s special representative for international negotiations Jason Greenblatt, another fervent supporter of the idea that Israel should stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, called Friedman “in a panic.” He feared Trump “was going to put the screws to Netanyahu to force a deal.” Netanyahu was reportedly anxious, too.

So Trump’s pro-Israel advisers hatched a plan. Friedman told Netanyahu to “prepare a short video” of Abbas making statements, including about Palestinian armed resistance, which would make him look bad in the president’s eyes. The ploy worked. After the Israelis played the tape for Trump during a visit to Jerusalem, the president exclaimed, “Wow, is that the same guy I met in Washington last month? He seemed like such a sweet, peaceful guy.” When Trump met Abbas in Ramallah the next day, he berated the Palestinian leader for overseeing a policy to “pay people who kill Israelis.” According to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, who has close ties to Netanyahu, the president told Abbas that “I don’t believe you want to make a deal.”

“We dodged that bullet,” Friedman writes.

The story illustrates a dynamic that will likely play out again in Trump’s second term: The president will criticize Israeli behavior in ways that surprise the media and rattle his allies on the pro-Israel right. But it won’t matter, because he is again surrounding himself with passionate supporters of the Jewish state. And given Trump’s ignorance, laziness, and incompetence, his pro-Israel advisers will maneuver around him to ensure that Israel enjoys a free hand.

Trump’s criticisms of Netanyahu continued throughout his post-presidency. A few months after leaving the White House, he told an interviewer that “Bibi did not want to make peace. Never did.” And although Trump initially supported Israel’s war in Gaza, he grew critical as the destruction mounted. This March, he said that “Israel made a very big mistake” by allowing “shots of bombs being dropped into buildings in Gaza . . . It’s a very bad picture for the world.” After the interview, John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser and a George W. Bush-era hawk who has since broken with the 45th president, said that the comment “proves the point that I’ve tried to explain to people: that Trump’s support for Israel in the first term is not guaranteed in the second term, because Trump’s positions are made on the basis of what’s good for Donald Trump, not on some coherent theory of national security.”

Bolton is likely correct that Trump doesn’t care much about Israel. He doesn’t care much about anything except himself. But Bolton is wrong to assume that Trump’s personal preferences will determine policy in a second term. That’s because Trump operates within the contemporary Republican Party, where there are virtually no influential figures—among politicians, donors, or foreign policy experts—eager to challenge unconditional United States support for Israel. Even J.D. Vance, who is skeptical of American support for Ukraine, doesn’t apply that reticence to the Jewish state. In this environment, even a highly engaged, policy-oriented Republican president would struggle to find advisers willing to challenge Netanyahu. Trump is far too ignorant and self-absorbed for that. He instead takes the path of least resistance and surrounds himself with people deeply connected to the Jewish and Christian pro-Israel right. In the first term, that meant Friedman, Greenblatt, Kushner, United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. For his second, he has begun assembling even more extreme supporters of a “greater Israel” that would extend from the river to the sea: Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, UN Ambassador Elise Stefanik, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff. His nominees for secretary of state and secretary of defense, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, are zealously pro-Israel as well. Former Trump diplomat and extreme Iran hawk Brian Hook is running the transition team for the State Department. Even though Trump at times campaigned as a peace candidate who would end Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, this growing team clearly signals that he’s likely to help Israel make them even more brutal.


That’s certainly the lesson of Trump’s first term. Accounts from his advisers make it clear why, although he occasionally expressed independent instincts, his policies followed right-wing orthodoxy, delighting hardliners in the US and Israel. In Kushner’s memoir, Breaking History, he notes that Trump was reluctant to move the American embassy to Jerusalem without getting something from the Israeli government in return. Trump, who, according to Kushner, liked “to extract concessions out of his negotiating partners,” was intrigued by the idea of using the move to pressure Israel to freeze settlement growth. On December 2nd, 2017, Trump asked Kushner whether they were making a mistake by giving Netanyahu the embassy relocation for free. Kushner replied that the “move will build capital with the Israeli people” and thus make it easier for Israeli leaders “to make some politically tough compromises” in the future. The next day, Trump wobbled again. “Do you still feel confident this is the right move?” he asked. Kushner reassured him again. Two days later, Trump “began to second-guess his decision” once more, Kushner recalls, but went forward with it anyway. Trump simply didn’t care enough to translate his misgivings into policy.

Trump’s decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights followed a similar pattern. When Kushner and Bolton first suggested that the US recognize Israel’s ownership of the land it seized from Syria in 1967, Trump refused. “I have done too much for Bibi already,” he responded. “Let’s see what he does with the peace deal first.” But in March 2019, Kushner encouraged Friedman to try again. When Friedman reassured Trump that, by granting recognition, he would only be acknowledging reality on the ground, Trump asked his aide Dan Scavino to draft a tweet changing US policy. “What do you think?” Trump asked Kushner, who predictably replied, “This will go over well and be an historic action.” Trump then asked Friedman, “are you sure about this one?” and Friedman answered, “One thousand percent, sir. This will get a great response.” So, the tweet was sent.

The final example of Trump questioning his support for Israel, and thus temporarily dismaying his advisers before ultimately following their lead, came in the last full year of his presidency. Trump would come to be known for bypassing the Palestinians with the Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. But before that, he released a fantastical peace plan for Israel-Palestine, formulated by Kushner, Friedman, Hook, former Bush administration official Dina Powell, and Kushner’s deputy, Avi Berkowitz (who he had met at a Passover program at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix a decade earlier). In January 2020, Kushner told Trump that “we think now is the right time to release your peace plan.” Kushner boasted that Netanyahu and his Israeli political rival, Benny Gantz, were both willing to endorse the deal—which wasn’t surprising, since it allowed Israel to keep 30% of the West Bank, required it to dismantle no settlements, and offered Palestinians no actual sovereignty. “So, both the Israelis and the Palestinians have agreed to this?” Trump queried. Kushner admitted that the Palestinians had not, but said they would be blamed for rejecting the deal. Trump was unswayed. Perhaps sensing that the deal stood little chance of success if the Palestinians were shut out, Trump declared that “I don’t want to do anything if Abbas says no” and instructed his staff to arrange a call with the Palestinian leader.

Yet again, Trump’s pro-Israel advisers were despondent. According to Kushner, “Trump’s desire to solicit Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s approval before we released the plan slammed the brakes on our strategy and flipped it in reverse.” Kushner recounts Friedman exclaiming, “It’s over now. Our plan is never going to see the light of day, and our whole effort was for nothing.” But Abbas refused to talk to Trump until the deal was released. So, as usual, the policies written by Trump’s advisers determined the outcome, and the peace plan went ahead, despite the president’s reservations.

There’s little reason to believe the dynamic will be different in a second Trump term. If anything, Trump’s advisers will be even more uniformly pro-Israel than they were the first time around. At the beginning of Trump’s first term, his establishment-minded secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and his secretary of defense, James Mattis—both of whom opposed moving the US embassy to Jerusalem—at times sought to counterbalance hardline advisers like Kushner, Friedman, and Greenblatt. But now that Trump has fully vanquished the GOP’s comparatively cautious old guard, he has appointed a Middle East team filled with extremists. Huckabee has said there is no such thing as a Palestinian. Stefanik has used allegations of antisemitism to launch an assault on campus free speech. Rubio is close to mega-donor Miriam Adelson, who reportedly wants the US to bless Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. And now that Trump is 78, and in evident decline, it’s even less likely that he’ll have the physical stamina and mental coherence to override a team that appears dedicated to letting the Israeli government pursue policies that crowd Palestinians into ever smaller ghettos, where their choices range from misery to expulsion to death.

In the weeks and months to come, it’s likely that Trump will criticize Israel’s leaders, or its wars in Gaza and Lebanon, and that the media—ever alert to stories that play against type—will warn that Netanyahu’s days of blank-check US support may be coming to an end. Don’t fall for it. For a Republican Party now defined by ethnonationalism, ardent support for Israel is as foundational as hostility to non-white immigration to the US. Trump may waiver in his support for Israel. But his presidency will not.