June 9, 2025 - Epoch Times
04:49
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| What do you think is going to happen ultimately in the U.S.-Israel relationship? | |
| Okay, so the first thing to note is, you know, the rumors of a Trump-Netanyahu rift are just that. | |
| They are just rumors. | |
| You know, it's very hard to try to sort fact from fiction. | |
| In fact, Brett Baier on Fox News literally asked President Trump about this point blank, and Trump dismissed it and said, no, Netanyahu was a very tough job. | |
| October 7th was one of the worst days. | |
| You know, in the history of humanity, he's in a very difficult situation right now. | |
| So it's worth knowing that the one time that I'm aware of that he's been explicitly asked about this possible riff, point blank, he's emphatically denied it. | |
| Now, there is a slight history of Trump and Netanyahu butting heads. | |
| Let's, you know, let's recall that in November 2020, you know, after the dispute election, Netanyahu did congratulate President Biden. | |
| In his defense, he didn't really have a choice. | |
| I mean, you know, any foreign country has to be able to get along with the great country of the United States there, but President Trump was definitely upset about that after all that he had done to support Israel during his first administration there. | |
| You know, it looked like that there was a rapprochement, that there was a real reconciliation over the past year and a half. | |
| Netanyahu went down to Mar-a-Lago. | |
| They had these photos, smiling, thumbs up, and so forth. | |
| So it's very hard to know. | |
| I think that what you're seeing play out with all these kind of You're seeing a real-time rift in the Republican Party and in the administration when it comes to the view of Israel, of the U.S.'s relationship, and of Prime Minister Netanyahu as an individual. | |
| I think there are a lot of people in the broader Trump administration universe there who are probably not fans, actually, of Prime Minister Netanyahu there. | |
| Also, let's bear in mind that this second administration seems to be even more focused on the economic transactional part of international affairs and diplomacy than it probably was the first time around there. | |
| You know, I haven't necessarily seen a headline, you know, Israel pledges to commit, you know, trillion dollars. | |
| You know, I'm making up a number, but that seems to be thus far the easiest way to kind of curry favor with the Trump administration is to just open up your checkbooks. | |
| Easier said than done when you're a country like Saudi Arabia or Qatar that has just extraordinary amounts of petroleum reserves necessarily. | |
| But look, I continue to be optimistic about U.S.-Israel relations, certainly under this administration. | |
| The longer-term threat, very much so, is the younger generation of Americans, where the polls show that the 30-and-under category of Americans tend to be split, roughly split 50-50 almost when it comes to who you support between Israel and Hamas. | |
| Obviously, deeply concerning there. | |
| But I would not be tremendously concerned when it comes to this particular administration. | |
| Ultimately, there are a lot of rumors flying around there. | |
| And, you know, look, the worst case scenario is that maybe President Trump says, Netanyahu, you know, you go be a little more independent. | |
| Not necessarily a bad thing. | |
| Israel should be more independent, frankly, of the United States there. | |
| I mean, that's kind of the whole purpose of Zionism, the term that we just defined there, is for the Jews to be in control themselves there without kind of listening to any great benevolent superpower like the United States or anyone else at all there. | |
| So that wouldn't necessarily be the end of the world. | |
| And the final thing that I'll say Literally no one. | |
| And to be clear, I don't know if he means it. | |
| I don't even know what that means in practice there. | |
| By the way, it even looked to me, and I was kind of in the room when he was announcing that. | |
| It almost looked like Netanyahu was surprised. | |
| But I don't think he really was. | |
| There must have been some kind of forewarning. | |
| I don't know, honestly. | |
| It's possible. | |
| I mean, that really caught everyone off guard, honestly. | |
| You know, by talking about things like population transfer of Arabs, I mean, he's literally starting to sound... | |
| So, I mean, Trump has said some shockingly pro-Israel things there. | |
| So it's a mixed bag. | |
| I think this kind of war in unnamed sources is just indicative of this broader rift in the party. | |
| The Republican Party, the MAGA movement, by and large, remains a pro-America, pro-Western civilization, pro-Israel movement. | |
| There are definitely real forces out there that are very critical. | |
| Trying to contain those forces was a large reason, frankly, why I wrote this book in the first place, Israel and Civilization, there. | |
| So we'll see how it plays out. |
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