‘F*ck Him’: How Trump’s 2020 Election Denial Led Him to Turn on Israel’s Netanyahu
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday evening blasted his once close ally Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in the wake of the devastating Hamas terrorist attack on the south of Israel. Trump’s ire toward Netanyahu, however, should come as no surprise to close observers of their relationship as Trump has made it clear that the Israeli leader had betrayed him by believing in the legitimacy of U.S. elections.
While speaking to supporters in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump made a litany of off-the-rails comments, including repeatedly calling Hezbollah “very smart.”
Trump eventually turned to Netanyahu and insisted that he “let us down” in regard to the U.S. killing of Iranian Revolutionary Guard leader Qasem Soleimani. Trump said of Netanyahu:
I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. That was a very terrible thing. I will say that. And so, when I see sometimes the intelligence– you talk about the intelligence or you talk about some of the things that went wrong over the last week, they’ve gotta straighten it out because they’re fighting – potentially – a very big force, potentially Iran. And when they have people saying the wrong things, everything they say is being digested by these people because they’re vicious and they’re smart, and boy are they vicious ’cause nobody’s ever seen the kind of sight that we’ve seen. Nobody’s ever seen it. But they cannot play games.
So, we were disappointed by that. Very disappointed, but we did the job ourself, but it was absolute precision, magnificent, beautiful job. And then Bibi tried to take credit for it. That didn’t make me feel too good, but that’s all right. So, they gotta strengthen themselves up.
Israeli journalist Barak Ravid interviewed Trump after he left office for his book on the Abraham Accords and Trump held nothing back when talking about Netanyahu.
“The first person that congratulated [Biden] was Bibi Netanyahu, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with. … Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake,” Trump told Ravid. Trump has long considered parroting his widely debunked claims of 2020 election fraud and that he actually beat Biden as a key test of loyalty.
Ravid noted that while in office, Trump and Netanyahu were the closest of allies, but have not spoken since Trump left office. “I haven’t spoken to him since, f*ck him,” Trump said. “It was at the end of a 20-minute monologue about all the bad things he thought about Netanyahu,” Ravid later revealed about Trump’s expletive for Netanyahu.
Ravid told the Haaretz Podcast in May that speaking with Trump made him realize that the Trump-Netanyahu bromance was never real to begin with, it “was like watching a show for four years. And then you realize that everything you saw was just BS, because the reality between those two was completely different.”
Trump also slammed Netanyahu in a radio interview with Fox’s Brian Kilmeade. “He has been hurt very badly because of what’s happened here. He was not prepared. He was not prepared and Israel was not prepared. And under Trump, they wouldn’t have had to be prepared,” the GOP frontrunner said of the Israeli PM – referring to the attack on Israel that killed over 1,300 people on Saturday.
Ravid spoke about his interview with Trump on a May 2023 podcast, which you can listen to here.
