There was one moment in the Knesset speech on the day the war ended that particularly troubled Likud. It happened when the president spontaneously praised Yair Lapid. “He’s a nice guy,” he said to Netanyahu — and then jabbed the prime minister: “You don’t need to be so tough now that the war is over.”
Was this a hint that the president intends, God forbid, to adopt neutrality in the upcoming election campaign?
There are precedents. Netanyahu, as we recall, hung a giant poster of himself with Trump on the side of the Ze’ev Fortress, the Likud HQ, during the 2019 campaign. Yet the American president at the time made sure to invite Netanyahu’s direct rival, Benny Gantz, to the White House as well — much to the fury of the Prime Minister’s Office. Even the most hawkish president on peace and territory, and the friendliest to Netanyahu, preferred to appear above Israeli electoral politics.
The reason is that, then as now, a quiet struggle is taking place inside the White House over Netanyahu. Jared Kushner, for example, is far from an enthusiastic supporter of the prime minister. Steve Witkoff holds an even more negative view of him. One can reasonably assume that the sharp (and in hindsight very inaccurate) briefings against Netanyahu ahead of this week’s meeting in Mar-a-lago came from those quarters. There are powerful figures in the American administration who would very much like to see a different Israeli prime minister — for personal reasons as well as ideological ones.
But even larger parts of the administration — Secretary of State Rubio, Defense Secretary Hegseth, Ambassador Huckabee, and others — remain full-on Likudniks, if not further to the right of it. And where does Trump stand? In polls, he has been classified as “leaning Likud.” The result so far is unequivocal: “With almost any other leader, Israel would not have survived,” he has said repeatedly in front of the cameras at Mar-a-Lago. Netanyahu himself could not have phrased it better. Few understand better than he does the dramatic electoral significance such a statement may carry — or, for that matter, the impact of showing up to receive the Israel Prize on the eve of a campaign launch. After all, someone who pressures for a pardon can also astonish with moves no one anticipates.
Still, efforts to push Trump away from supporting Netanyahu have not ceased. For example, Naftali Bennett recently hinted that the way to reach the president’s heart is to establish a large political framework, together with Eisenkot and preferably also Lieberman. Someone known for his fondness for “extra large” — everything about him bigger than life, from hotels to signatures — is unlikely to even glance at boutique parties.
