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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everyone. I'm JVL here with my bulwark colleague Andrew Egger. And Donald Trump had an impromptu little press avail on the tarmac and he had some things to say about Israel and oh, my God, look at the tape.
- [00:17]
B
What have you said to Prime Minister Netanyahu about Iran and how long to hold off on strike?
- [00:22]
C
Fine. He'll do whatever I want him to do. He's very, very good man. He'll do whatever I want him to do. And he's. He's a great guy. To me, he's a great guy. Don't forget, he was a wartime prime minister. And he's not treated right in Israel. In my opinion. I'm right now at 99% in Israel. I could run for prime minister. So maybe after I do this, I'll go to Israel, run for prime minister. I had a poll this morning. I'm 99%, so that's good. But, no, he's a wartime prime minister, and I just don't think they treat him well. I think they have a president over there that treats him very poorly.
- [01:02]
A
Okay, a lot to unpack there. Andrew, do you think that the Prime Minister of Israel will do whatever the President of the United States tells him to do, like a little bitch?
- [01:17]
B
I think. I think it is perhaps to Bibi Netanyahu's political credit, to the credit of his political savvy, that he seems to have implanted the idea in Donald Trump's mind that he completely within. In Trump's thrall, that he is. That he's going along with anything that Trump wants to do when, as we know from extensive reporting about the beginning of this war. It's exactly the opposite. It's exactly the opposite. Netanyahu has. Has picked some sort of lock with Trump in terms of being able to do what anybody who wants to direct Trump needs to be able to do, which is let him feel like the alpha, let him feel like he's calling all the shots while sort of quietly and reasonably and subtly bringing him around to whatever posture you want in the first place. I mean, this was not subtle at the beginning of the war. This was Trump administration officials trotting out the idea that, well, you know, Israel was going to go ahead with this no matter what, because Israel was going to go ahead with this no matter what. We judged that. That there was an imminent threat to United States assets and personnel and materiel over there, and therefore we needed to get involved with this war, too. That was right at the very beginning of the war. If it were true, if it were actually true, that Bibi just does anything Trump wants him to do, period. That whole argument falls apart, obviously, because if we didn't want to be involved, we would have just told him, don't go get involved. I don't know. I mean, I think they are pretty simpatico about this war. They both hate Iran. Donald Trump has a long history of hating Iran. I don't think he took a lot of talking into, in terms of getting involved with this conflict. But it was very funny to hear him say that, giving those earlier justifications.
- [02:55]
A
I understand we're not supposed to take any of this terribly seriously, but one does wonder how Trump can hold in his head simultaneously that Bibi Netanyahu is treated very badly by the Israelis. Very badly. He's been prime minister for 16 years. But very, very badly treated. But also the Israelis who treat Bibi NETANYAHU so badly, 99% of them love Trump.
- [03:22]
B
Is this a real number, by the way? I don't know if you ran this down. Do you have any idea whether this is pegged to anything? I mean, it seems like one of these facts that Trump is just like, yeah, I saw it this morning. They love me 99%. Maybe somebody said it. Maybe somebody wrote that down on a piece of paper and handed it to him. Maybe he cooked it up out of his own head.
- [03:38]
A
Human printer spat it out at him.
- [03:41]
B
No, it's true. Part of the just psychology of this here as well is that Trump is. Trump both has all of these friends and neighbors that he sees as like, you know, simpatico with him around the world and his buds and his allies, and he will go out of his way to help them out. But at the same time, and this sort of goes back to what I was saying a minute ago, he definitely sees them all as like the 1B, like the beta to his alpha. Nobody has the same political instincts Trump has. If you ask Trump, nobody's as good at doing the thing as he is. Nobody can make the same deals, nobody can see through in negotiations the same way he can. So I actually don't think it's necessarily contradictory for him to be like, ah, you know, they, they really did him dirty over there. But, but I'm pretty sure I could have. I'm pretty sure I could be, be, you know, leading, leading Israel into its own golden age, making Israel the hottest country on earth with, with never before seen levels of approval over there. I think, I think, you know, any. It all adds up to, to something that at least makes sense in his own mind.
- [04:35]
A
It seems to me there's an interesting dovetail here with Thomas Massie's defeat last night in the 4th district of Kentucky. I don't know if you watched his concession speech, Andrew. I did, because I was on Live with Sam. I mean, so far, this race turned on two things, really. The big thing it turned on was that Donald Trump wanted Massey gone. The other thing it turned on was Israel and aipac Massey in his concession speech. I mean, I don't know if these weren't really dog whistles. They're just bullhorn stuff about America first and other countries manipulating. I mean, it was nuts. Absolutely nuts. Not quite at, like, Candace levels, but, like, ready to get there. You know, he could. He could get there.
- [05:26]
D
I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gowran in Tel Aviv. I did get the call through, though.
- [05:44]
B
I have.
- [05:44]
D
I have called and conceded the race. We've been honorable the whole time, and we're gonna stay that way.
- [05:52]
A
This is not the sort of performance from Trump that would quiet that sort of thing, is it?
- [06:00]
B
You know, if you're Massey, and in particular if you're one of Massey's supporters, this was an enormous amount of kind of like the really online argument where you're in a really uncomfortable place. You're in this political movement, maga, the magafied Republican Party, that basically turns on nothing except the say so of Trump, the will of. And so you have to find other ways to kind of, like, get some sort of, like, right coded answer out there. And one of the ones that they really did seize on was, you know, the APAC money, the APAC spending against Massie, the fact that there was all this cash pouring in it, I mean, it's true, enormous sums, was the most expensive House primary in history, in large part because of this APAC spending. And a lot of Massey's allies were basically saying, hey, come on, like, what's going on with this? What's going on with the fact that, like, you know, Trump and AIPAC are suddenly, like, the biggest sort of like, buddy, buddy force in all of politics. I think there's like, an interesting parallel here between the way that Trump still wields, like, such astonishing control inside the Republican Party and the way that sort of the pro Israel lobby still wields quite a lot of that same control within the Republican Party, while those two organisms and organizations and sort of mindsets are losing so much ground everywhere else. I mean, like, I Feel like a Republican Party primary is basically the last place in America politically where you can feel really good if AIPAC is like coming in as artillery support on your behalf. And the same with Donald Trump. Right? I mean, if, if you're in a Republican primary. And what's that now for now? Well, right. No, I think it's a lagging indicator. I think, I think, I don't know what this looks like a couple of years from now in terms of either of these things. But, like, if you're in a Democratic primary or even if you're in like a purple state and running as a Republican, you don't want Donald Trump parachuting in to like, say a lot of good things for you. You don't want AIPAC coming in to spend a bunch of money on your behalf. That's gonna open you up to more smoke than it's gonna give you in terms of tangible benefits. But I think, like, again, we're in this weird position where Trump has, Trump has lost so much support, where opinions about Israel in America are curdling so much, and yet within the time capsule that is sort of the currently constituted Republican Party, these remain really formidable forces when it comes to winning primaries in really red areas.
- [08:20]
A
Hard to see how that survives Trump. Right? I mean, once Trump is gone, which, you know, I'm bearish on that, it can be a long time. But once Trump is gone, the future is not a PAC on the Republican side, I don't think it does not seem, I mean, JD Vance not super friendly to this stuff. Tucker Carlson, not super friendly to this stuff. A lot of cleavages are around this very issue and we saw it in Kentucky. Four, the huge age chasm where Massie did great among it was under 40 Republicans. Now aren't a ton of under 40 Republicans, which is why Massey lost by 10. But, you know, like, the actuarial tables are what they are. And all the AIPAC loving, Fox News, watching old Republicans, they do age out of this stuff eventually. And the people coming in are much more like J.D. vance, Candace Tucker, Marjorie Taylor Greene on the Israel question than they are like Trump. I don't know. I just look at this and I think to myself, yikes. Trump's populist instincts here just seem to be wrong. Right? This is, I can't understand why he's lagging this like with the vaccine stuff, right? Trump was out on the vaccine stuff. He got his hands, hands wrapped on it and so he retreated and hugged rfk. I guess he hasn't gotten his knuckles wrapped quite yet on the Israel stuff and he still feels like he can get in the way with it. But at some point doesn't he want to, I don't know, doesn't he see Bibi as a burden?
- [09:57]
B
Yeah, I do think there's, there's kind of a difference here just because a lot of the stuff where Trump was way out ahead on some of this populist stuff was in channeling these populist energies that were pretty evenly distributed throughout the party. I do think there's going to be a really long tail on Republican support for Israel just because like you're saying to the extent that the Republican Party is getting less pro Israel, it is only because of young people changing their minds and old people kind of aging out of the process. Right. There are not a lot of longtime Israel supporters who looked at the war in Gaza or, or what have you and changed their minds, had a big time. They didn't source.