Trump Now Hates All the People Responsible for His Administration’s Conservative Successes

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 16, 2023

 

Donald Trump’s decision to use the occasion of the worst single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust to heap criticism upon Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a useful reminder of where the former president’s instincts always take him.

 

In interviews and speeches, Trump attacked Netanyahu because he was “not prepared” for the October 7 attack. Netanyahu “let us down,” the former president said, when he failed to participate in the strike that neutralized Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Qasem Soleimani. Trump criticized the Israeli intelligence services for letting indications of the attack “slip by” them. He remarked upon how “very smart” it was for Hezbollah to attack Israel from the north, though Hezbollah had not yet actually joined the fight. “If the election wasn’t rigged, there would be nobody even thinking about going into Israel,” Trump added.

 

The remarks were met with condemnation from more courageous quarters within the Republican Party. “You’re not going to find me throwing verbal grenades at Israeli leadership,” Ron DeSantis scoffed. Mike Pence agreed that “this is no time” to create daylight between the Israeli government and its American allies. “Look, Hezbollah are not smart,” he said. “They’re evil.” Chris Christie declared that “only a fool” would say what Trump had said. Doug Burgum rejected those who would paint Hezbollah’s and Hamas’s actions “in any positive fashion,” preferring “barbaric,” “unthinkable,” and “inhumane” instead. “Who cares what [Trump] thinks about Netanyahu?” Nikki Haley said. “This is about the people of Israel.”

 

The pile-on clearly caught the attention of the Trump campaign, which committed to a cleanup operation by replacing the former president’s bio on the social-media platform where he cloisters himself with some pro-Israeli hashtags. But will any of this matter to Trump’s supporters? Probably not.

 

“When Donald Trump was president, the embassy was moved to Jerusalem and the Golan Heights were annexed and none of this happened,” said one Florida Republican who criticized DeSantis, in particular, for making hay of Trump’s comments. “We didn’t have wars when Donald Trump was president.” The remarks are surely illustrative of the rationalizations to which Trump’s core voters will commit themselves. And the former president’s record in relation to Israel is admirable. But by all accounts, it is a record not entirely of Trump’s own making. Rather, it was the conception of a lot of folks Trump now hates.

 

Trump’s steadfast defenders would be well-advised to avoid internalizing the Trump operation’s hype. To the extent that there were “no wars” under Trump, it is because the administration didn’t shy away from the preemptive use of force in the Middle East, in particular. Israel was not spared conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah during the Trump administration. And the notion that Trump’s grievances with Netanyahu are due entirely to Israel’s abstention from participation in the Soleimani strike is absurd. The U.S. did not seek the participation of Israel in that kinetic strike on Soleimani, an Iranian government asset, inside Iraq — nor would any administration possessed of a passing familiarity with the region’s politics. The origins of Trump’s animus toward Netanyahu are more personal and parochial than that.

 

“F*** him,” Trump reportedly said of Israel’s head of state in a rage over Netanyahu’s acknowledgement of the 2020 election results. “Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake.” And yet, the Trump White House did preside over policies that supporters of Israel’s sovereign prerogatives greatly appreciated. How do we square that record with Trump’s apparent hostility toward the Israeli government? The answer is that so many of those policies were designed and implemented by the conventional Republicans with whom Trump surrounded himself — people who long ago fell out of Trump’s good graces and will not craft policy in a second Trump term.

 

The Trump administration’s decision to formally relocate the U.S. diplomatic mission in Israel to Jerusalem was one Trump himself did favor, but he was convinced to ignore the objections to it from State Department functionaries by people like Mike Pence and Jared Kushner. Pence, in particular, reportedly convinced Trump that “his base would love the decision,” which stiffened his spine. Today, the former president believes his former vice president is “delusional” and has “gone to the dark side.”

 

When Trump was successfully lobbied by his inner circle to endorse Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights in 2019, it was Jared Kushner, Ambassador David Friedman, and national-security adviser John Bolton who did the lobbying. Trump himself was reluctant at first. “I have done too much for Bibi already,” Kushner recalls his father-in-law saying in his 2022 memoir Breaking History. “Let’s see what he does with the peace deal first.” At the time, the former president was irritated with Netanyahu over a policy dispute and even apparently toyed with the idea of endorsing his center-left opponent, Benny Gantz, as payback. Mercifully, he was talked out of it. Today, Friedman is persona non grata, having criticized Trump for sitting down with “human scum like Nick Fuentes.” Trump has called Bolton “one of the dumbest people in government” and an “unhinged warmonger.” Jared Kushner is keeping a wide distance from Trump’s 2024 campaign, reportedly at Trump’s request.

 

The Soleimani strike, which was undertaken not as a favor to Israel but in response to Iran-backed attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq and a brazen Iran-sponsored aerial assault on a Saudi oil refinery, was the brainchild of, among others, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo. “Pompeo provided the warrant for why Soleimani is a bad guy,” one Trump official told CNN. “Pompeo’s ability to sell such an aggressive Iran strategy to Trump — a conflict-averse President — is testament to his unparalleled sway,” the outlet observed. Pompeo has since advised the GOP to move on from “celebrity presidents” with “fragile egos,” and Trump has called his former top diplomat “very disloyal” in kind.

 

Much the same could be said of the Trump administration’s approach to Russia. Despite the president’s reliable rhetorical obsequiousness toward Vladimir Putin, his White House’s approach to Russia was as confrontational as that of any administration since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But who was it who convinced Trump to provide Ukraine with lethal arms, sanction the Nord Stream II pipeline, expel Russian diplomats, repossess Russian consular property, terminate the defunct intermediate-range nuclear-forces treaty, and impose Magnitsky Act sanctions on officials in Moscow? That was the work of people Trump and his allies no longer have any use for, like national-security adviser H. R. McMaster (whom Trump summarily fired and publicly rebuked), Defense secretary James Mattis (“the world’s most overrated general,” per the former president), Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (fired via tweet and branded “dumb as a rock”), and CIA director Gina Haspel (deemed “insubordinate”).

 

The architects of the policies about which Donald Trump brags the most will not be getting back together again. Trump’s biggest fans may paper over the incongruity between the pride the former president takes in his record and his profound distaste for the public servants who conceived of, lobbied for, and executed the policies it was built on. They certainly haven’t drawn any of the obvious conclusions that should follow from the fact that Trump’s antipathy toward his chosen subordinates is entirely mutual. But if Republican voters find those policies as or maybe even more desirable than the person who took credit for them, they should look for another candidate. Policy-wise, a second Trump administration would be nothing like the first.