WASHINGTON (The Thursday Times) — US President Donald Trump has named American hostility towards Israel as one of the main reasons his Republican Party lost both houses of Congress, saying in his first sit-down interview since last week’s midterm elections that there is “a great dislike, incredibly, for Israel”.
“They didn’t like the war. They didn’t like the fact that gasoline went up,” he told 60 Minutes in the interview, recorded at the White House on Friday and broadcast on Sunday. In the longer version released online, he went further: “There seems to be a dislike for Israel. So you have that, you have the war itself, you have the gas prices and I think those are the primary reasons.”
He cited no polling and did not say which voters he meant.
Backing Vance: Vice President JD Vance wrote on X the day after the vote that “the reason we lost is the war”. He said Trump voters who had left the party gave four answers when asked what would bring them back: end the war, deal with the cost of living, put America First and change the relationship with Israel. The polling has not been released.
Asked whether he agreed, Trump said: “I don’t disagree with it.” He said he had told Vance to write what he felt. His one wish, he said, was that Vance had also said whether he would go to war again. “My answer is an emphatic yes because you can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. “I think, historically, this will be a very good decision. Is it a good decision for today and tomorrow? Maybe not.”
Why it matters: the remark comes from the president who went to war on Iran alongside Israel in February, and who endorsed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nine days before Israel’s election last month.
Even so, Trump insisted that Israel owed its survival to him. “Israel would not exist except for Donald Trump,” he said, pointing to the American B-2 strikes on Iranian nuclear sites last year. “If I didn’t do that, there would be no Israel right now. Israel would be gone.”
Interviewer Ross Douthat asked whether he regretted helping Israel carry out the “decapitation strikes” on Iran’s leadership, which Douthat said appeared to have made Tehran escalate. Trump did not say he regretted them. “We had people that would have gone further,” he said.
He also said that countries the United States had protected “are going to pay us back any and all costs that we’ve had for the war”, adding: “Without us, they wouldn’t exist.” He named no country as paying.
The aid question: on election day, Trump said about $4 billion in annual American aid to Israel would stop: “By the end of this year we won’t be paying Israel.” He said Netanyahu had raised the idea himself. The current agreement, signed in 2016, provides $38 billion through 2028. President Isaac Herzog said the announcement came “like a bolt from the blue”. Netanyahu has said he wants American military aid tapered to zero over a decade, but Israel has not confirmed Trump’s timetable.
The numbers: in a Pew Research Center survey in March, 60% of American adults held an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 42% in 2022. Among Republicans aged 18 to 49, 57% were unfavourable, up from 50% a year earlier. Republicans as a whole remained favourable, by 58% to 41%.
There was no immediate response from Netanyahu or the Israeli government to Trump’s remark. After Vance’s post, former Israeli ambassador to Washington Danny Ayalon said: “I don’t think Israel should be dragged into domestic politics in the United States.”
The comments reach Israel as Gadi Eisenkot, handed the mandate on Sunday, has 28 days to form a government that would replace Netanyahu.
On Iran and Pakistan: Trump said he was “not looking to” escalate against Iran and that a deal had been close before the election, which he said gave Tehran “a little bit of a hope certificate”. The interview was recorded before Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi gave Washington a choice between Iran’s offer and war. Listing wars he says he has settled, Trump again claimed credit for stopping an India-Pakistan conflict: “The prime minister of Pakistan said Trump saved 30 to 50 million lives.”
