President Donald Trump lit into Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a fiery interview on Fox & Friends, accusing his former ally of breaking trust and acting in bad faith.
Just an hour and a half after Trump unleashed an angry tirade about the collapse of the ceasefire between Israel and Iran, he spoke with Fox host Lawrence Jones to explain why he was angrier with Netanyahu than with Iran.
Speaking to reporters on the White House lawn before heading to a NATO summit in The Netherlands, Trump didn’t hold back. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*** they’re doing, do you understand that?” he said, visibly frustrated.
On Monday, Trump had been praised by anti-war conservatives for brokering a short-lived ceasefire after days of escalating strikes between Israel and Iran — including an Iranian missile attack on a U.S. base in Qatar, following American raids on Iranian nuclear sites.
But by Tuesday morning, the deal had unraveled. Both sides blamed each other, and Trump was furious.
Fox’s Lawrence Jones said Trump had just spoken to Netanyahu before the interview and was livid. “I haven’t seen you this upset in a while, what’s really going on?” Jones recalled asking.
“He had just hung up with Bibi Netanyahu, the [Israeli] prime minister, and he said that the prime minister is bringing all the planes back,” Jones said. “I said, ‘Why are you so frustrated with Israel?’ And he says, because he didn’t feel like it was good faith, that even though they still had some time until the ceasefire, that they essentially unloaded on Iran.”
When Jones asked Trump about Iran, Trump reportedly said: “They got to save face for the country. They still got to appear to be strong. Their program is done. I probably fixed all of that when they hit their targets there.” He added, “I’m not happy with both of them, but more so Israel,” because he believes Iran’s nuclear program is “over, it’s done.”
Over on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, hosts Joe Scarborough and Jonathan Lemire were stunned — not just by Trump’s language, but by how harshly he went after Israel.
“You can sort through the F word, but geopolitically, and I’m dead serious here, his message to Israel is really the great takeaway,” Scarborough said.
“We got the full Trump experience just there,” Lemire added. “Full Trump. He is certainly more – his language is much more colorful in private than he usually allows in public. We got a little bit of it there too.”
Lemire continued: “Even in his remarks to reporters there, though angry at Iran, very clearly far more so at Israel. And then doubling down on that with that Truth Social post. That’s the issue here.”
The Morning Joe crew pointed out that while Trump and Netanyahu were once close allies, their relationship has been strained. Trump notably skipped visiting Israel during a recent Middle East trip.
Though the two seemed to be working together again during the recent military campaign, things quickly turned sour.
“President Trump wants the war to stop. He didn’t want it to begin in the first place. He went along with it,” said Scarborough. “He did help, certainly, with that strike at the facilities on Saturday. But now he’s eager for it to come to a quick conclusion. And he’s furious that, at least for now, it hasn’t just yet.”
Watch Joe Scarborough and Jonathan Lemire’s reaction below:
