During an Election Day interview with Fox News, President Donald Trump made the surprising announcement that a recurring $4 billion aid package to Israel will be “cut off at the end of the year.” Trump remains under fire for joining forces with Israel in an unpopular war with Iran, and his Tuesday statement sounded like a Hail Mary attempt to help the GOP win over swing voters who oppose aid to the U.S. ally.
If that particular aid package is ended, it’s likely to be replaced by a more covert policy of arming Israel with U.S. weapons. But Trump clearly recognized that it could be politically advantageous to appear to be severing aid to Israel. A slow-moving but seismic shift is taking place across American politics: Progressives are gaining real power in the debate over Israel. Expect them to be even louder as 2028 politicking kicks off.
Trump said on Fox that the $4 billion aid package would end at the end of the year because the Israelis “don’t need it.” But as he continued, he referred to Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, and he made his political strategy clear: “Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don’t need it? It’s a bad talking point, because when you say ‘Why don’t we give everybody four billion dollars,’ Israel is our number one, we give them more than anybody else, and they no longer need it, we’ve been doing it for years.”
To the extent that Trump was motioning at a real policy idea, he may have been referring to a memorandum of understanding that provides $3.8 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel each year. But that does not expire until September 2028. Trump said during the interview that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had proposed the idea of ending that aid. But the timetables that Netanyahu has publicly discussed for weaning Israel off U.S. aid take place over the next decade. MS NOW’s Felicia Schwartz reported Tuesday, “Although the U.S. and Israel have had discussions on ending direct aid, Israeli officials were caught off guard by the timing and are trying to figure out the implications of Trump’s announcement, said two people familiar with the matter — one with direct knowledge of the discussions — granted anonymity to share sensitive conversations.”
We seem to be in the early stages of an inversion of the bipartisan consensus on support to the longtime ally.
Even if Israel was caught off guard, it’s unlikely that U.S. aid to Israel is on the brink of ending. But it is likely such aid will be less transparent.
“The Israelis and their supporters in Washington have been working to shift the aid from the MOU model to the dark labyrinth of the Pentagon contracting system,” Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a senior adviser at the Quincy Institute, noted Tuesday. As Mother Jones reported, Congress for months has been considering “phasing out straightforward financial aid to Israel, and instead reframing American spending on Israel as a legally mandated defense industrial partnership, as Americans sour on directly sending taxpayer dollars to the country.” Such legislation would likely reduce Pentagon and congressional oversight, Vlahos pointed out.
In other words, to the extent that Trump wasn’t purely making things up out of whole cloth in his announcement, he might have been making the first move in a bureaucratic shell game on Israeli aid. But the fact that he feels compelled to play this game — and use it as an eleventh-hour gimmick — speaks to how politics around the U.S.-Israeli relationships are changing.
For decades, the conventional wisdom has held that criticizing Israel too forcefully is politically lethal. But Trump saw an Arab American progressive like El-Sayed as a threat to the GOP’s voter base because he criticized Israel. We seem to be in the early stages of an inversion of the bipartisan consensus on support for the longtime ally.
In recent months, potential Democratic White House hopefuls have started positioning themselves on aid to Israel — and the trend is clear: Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a longtime pro-Israel stalwart, now calls for ending U.S. military aid to Israel. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a liberal weather vane, supports conditioning aid to Israel and has begun boasting about not taking money from AIPAC.
Meanwhile, on the right, Tucker Carlson has banded together with MAGA activists like former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to hammer Trump on partnering with Israel in the war on Iran from an “America First” perspective. Carlson has openly signaled interest in helping launch a third party — and has fixated on the idea that severing ties with Israel is key to ending American interventionism in the Middle East. (As I have argued, Carlson’s fixation on Israel as controlling the U.S. is both ahistorical and grounded in antisemitic stereotypes.)
Trump was feeling the heat from the left and from the right. His Election Day anxiety foreshadows one of the central fault lines that has the potential to cause political realignments in 2028.
The post Reading between the lines of Trump’s Election Day surprise on Israel policy appeared first on MS NOW.
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