Trump Confirms He Berated Netanyahu in Profanity-Laced Phone Call: ‘I Said Bibi, We Gotta Stop This!’
President Donald Trump confirmed reports that he berated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a profanity-laced phone call as he grew frustrated at the foreign leader’s repeated attacks on Lebanon.
The call, first reported by Axios journalist Barak Ravid, came as Iran threatened to pull out of peace negotiations with the U.S. as a result of Israel’s strikes in Lebanon, which resulted in Trump phoning Netanyahu directly.
Multiple sources told Ravid that the president unloaded on the prime minister, calling him “crazy” and ungrateful. Senior officials on Netanyahu’s team, however, pushed back on the Axios report, claiming it was “inaccurate” and denied certain “personal remarks” allegedly made by Trump.
After that fallout, speaking to the New York Post’s Miranda Devine for the newspaper’s podcast, Pod Force One, the president was asked directly about the claims that he’d cursed out Netanyahu.
“Now Axios reported that you had a phone call with Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, in which you were angry with him. You said, ‘Are you effing crazy? What are you effing doing? I helped you stay out of jail.’ Is that true?” Devine asked. “Did you speak to him in those terms?”
“I did,” Trump confirmed.
He continued: “I wouldn’t say angry. I was a little bit perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon. You know, at some point I said, ‘Bibi we gotta stop this, we gotta stop it.’ But I have a very good relationship. We’ve done well together. He always says we could never have done it, but everybody knows that we could have never done it without the United States. But we’ve worked very well together.”
He added, “I like Bibi a lot and I’ve worked very well with him. We had where, you know, where I’m a wartime president, he’s a wartime prime minister. Very important part of the world, and I think we’ve done, you know, very well.”
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