The president of the United States confirmed last week that he cursed at the prime minister of Israel over the phone. On the same podcast, in the same breath, he said: “I really love Bibi and work with him excellently.”
Pick a headline. Most of the world’s media picked the first one. Axios reported the Beirut call in all its profane glory, including the warning that Israel would soon find itself alone, and the analysts lined up to pronounce the relationship dead.
Some of that was analysis. Some of it was wishful thinking disguised as analysis.
I don’t buy it. We know what Donald Trump sounds like when he genuinely despises someone, because he has shown us this with our very own prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
When Netanyahu congratulated Joe Biden in November 2020, Trump told journalist Barak Ravid exactly what he thought of him, on tape, in language we can’t print, and then froze him out for years. No anonymous sources needed. The man said it himself and meant every word.
Compare that to now. Anonymous officials describe furious phone calls, and within days, Trump is on camera softening his own leaks. “A little bit perturbed,” he called it. Perturbed is what you are with your family. A president who truly wanted out of this relationship would not spend a week walking his own profanity back toward affection. That’s a tell.
So where is the anger coming from? This is the part that should make those of us here in Israel uncomfortable.
At times, Netanyahu needs Trump to sidestep his own advisors' counsel
In mid-February, in the White House Situation Room, Netanyahu made the pitch of his life. According to The New York Times account, which we covered in these pages in April, Mossad director David Barnea and senior IDF officials appeared on the screens behind the prime minister, a wartime leader staged with his command arrayed behind him.
The Israelis showed Trump a video of potential post-regime leaders, former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi among them. Iran’s missile program would be destroyed within weeks. The regime would be too weak to close the Strait of Hormuz. Then the uprising, and after the uprising, a new Iran.
Trump’s response, by that account: “Sounds good to me.”
His own people were less impressed. US intelligence assessed the uprising and regime change scenarios as detached from reality. The CIA director called the plan “farcical.” The secretary of state put it more crudely, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs warned the president that in his experience, this was standard Israeli procedure: they oversell.
Four months later, the Strait of Hormuz was closed, and gas prices had become Trump’s biggest domestic headache heading into the midterms. The uprising never came.
So yes, Trump is angry, but he is angry the way a customer is angry. He feels he overpaid for a product that was advertised as transformative, and a president who feels he overpaid is a very different animal from a president who has turned on Israel.
The personal distrust does exist; it just lives one ring away from the Oval Office. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have spent months coordinating with Doha, Cairo, and Ankara, and they have come to see Netanyahu as the obstacle to their regional architecture.
Those who were in the room at Mar-a-Lago in December have told me that Kushner positioned himself as the skeptic in that meeting, pressing Netanyahu with hard questions, shielding the president from another pitch.
Kushner and Witkoff don’t trust Bibi. But they aren’t the president, and Bibi knows it, which is why every meeting becomes an attempt to convince an audience of one over the heads of his advisers.
On the very day I wrote this, we published an interview with Oded Eilam, who once headed the Mossad’s counterterrorism division. His complaint? That Trump is the naive one, haggling with Tehran like a tourist in a bazaar.
Sit with that for a moment. Our security establishment thinks Trump doesn’t understand Iran. Trump’s security establishment thinks Israel oversold Iran. Somehow, both are right.
Which brings me to the real cost, and it has nothing to do with birthday greetings or expletives.
Trump will forgive Netanyahu. He forgives people he likes, and he likes winning with Israel. The harder question arrives the next time an Israeli prime minister sits in the Situation Room with the Mossad chief on the screen behind him and asks America to believe an Israeli assessment.
After this war, will the president in that chair believe it?
The relationship will survive. Whether our credibility in that room survives is a separate question, and it’s worth far more than a phone call.