Thank goodness Biden refused him the privilege of getting classified information in the post-presidency
Trump ties the attack on Israel to the 2020 election which he describes as rigged pic.twitter.com/BSX0SC8N8c
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 12, 2023
Reminder that Trump is beefing with Netanyahu because he recognized Biden’s victory. If BN embraced the big lie Trump would defend him. Policy has 0 to do with it. https://t.co/x6AYYHSUB8
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 12, 2023
Once again, he shows his casual disregard about classified information. He doesn’t seem to know if he’s sharing it or, more importantly, care. And he thinks that a good time to air his personal grievances with Netanyahu is when Israel is at war and the entire Middle East is on tender hooks.
On Wednesday Donald Trump held a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida. Considering Palm Beach County has one of the highest concentrations of Jewish people in America, the typical person at a Trump rally is quite conservative, and Israel is now responding to one of deadliest attacks on its soil in history, I think it’s safe to assume many people in the crowd were supportive of Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Yet Trump picked this rally, at this moment, to publicly upbraid Netanyahu.
After saying, “We will stand with Israel 100 percent,” he digressed: “I did have a bad experience with Israel, though, when we took out [Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps General Qasem] Soleimani” on January 3, 2020.
As he told the story, he said, “I don’t think this has ever been told. They’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s classified information.’ Well, maybe it is, but I don’t think so.”
He said Israel and the U.S. government were “working together” on plans to kill Soleimani before he could launch attacks on American military installations. (In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser report that Trump “gave shifting explanations” for the assassination, and that claims of imminent “attacks of four American embassies” were not “backed up in briefings with congressional leaders” by military and intelligence officials.)
But “the night before it happened,” according to Trump, “I got a call that Israel will not be participating in this attack … I said, I don’t like that, that’s not good.”
Trump said he ordered the American military to proceed without Israel. “We did it, but I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down, that was a very terrible thing … We did the job ourself [sic] and it was absolute precision—magnificent, beautiful job. And then Bibi tried to take credit for it … That didn’t make me feel too good.”
This is not the first time Trump has aired his beef with Netanyahu. In an interview conducted by Axios’s Barak Ravid for his book Trump’s Peace, Trump complained that Netanyahu quickly accepted the results of the 2020 election and publicly congratulated Joe Biden: “The first person who congratulated Joe Biden, because this was an election in dispute, it’s still in dispute. The first person who congratulated me 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 … I haven’t spoken to him since. Fuck him.”
The relationship was strained before the election. In January 2020, after the Soleimani operation, the two announced a “peace” offer to the Palestinians at the White House, involving $50 billion in commercial investment in a new Palestinian state. Netanyahu was eager to burnish his political standing as Israeli elections loomed, so, according to The Divider, he turned the White House ceremony “into a campaign event, speaking from the podium for a full twenty minutes.”
That wasn’t in the script. “Trump did not like anyone stealing his thunder, especially in his own house,” wrote Baker and Glasser.
“’What the hell was that?’ he demanded of his aides afterward. Trump was doing him a favor, the latest of a whole slew of favors, the president told others, and Netanyahu had upstaged him.”
I haven’t seen a lot of commentary on his rally last night so far today but he went over the line I would have even expected him to to observe. It’s one of the few things I’d have thought might shake some of his cult loose but it doesn’t look as though they’ll ever hear about it.
The NY Times had a few more details of where Trump has been on this. I hadn’t heard him say this before:
He then criticized Israeli intelligence, pointing in part to failures to anticipate and stop Hamas, the Islamic militant group, from executing such a large-scale and devastating attack. “They’ve got to straighten it out,” Mr. Trump said. […]
“If the election wasn’t rigged,” he said, “there would be nobody even thinking about going into Israel.”
[…]
Mr. Trump also criticized Mr. Netanyahu in a Fox News Radio interview that is expected to air on Thursday. In a clip from that interview that aired on television on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that Mr. Netanyahu “was not prepared and Israel was not prepared.”
He again suggested Israeli intelligence had been deficient, saying, “Thousands of people knew about it and they let this slip by. ”
He’s not wrong. But to go into Florida and say it at this moment, even as he’s complimenting Hezbollah for being very smart (just like Putin, Xi, Kim and all the other despots he admires so greatly) is bizarre, even for him.