After praising Hezbollah and criticizing Netanyahu, Trump faces backlash

Former President Donald Trump faced an intense backlash Thursday from a bi-partisan and multinational group of critics, a day after he praised the intelligence of the terrorist group Hezbollah and reprimanded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu despite this week’s deadly attacks against Israel.

Trump’s critics — who included Republicans, the White House, and Israeli government — accused the GOP presidential candidate of prioritizing personal grievances ahead of offering support to a country gripped by crisis.

“Given the situation there, now’s not the time to be doing, like what Donald Trump did, attacking Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, attacking Israel’s defense minister, saying somehow that Hezbollah were very smart,” Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday, in remarks highlighted by his presidential campaign. “We need to all be on the same page, now’s not the time to air personal grievances about an Israeli prime minister. Now’s the time to support their right to defend themselves to the hilt.”

Trump’s criticisms renew longstanding concerns about his devotion to settling personal scores even at times of international crisis, and raise questions about whether the controversy will weaken his support among conservative Jewish voters, a group he has assiduously courted for years.

His remarks came just days after Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel out of the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds of the country’s citizens and sending shockwaves through the international community. Netanyahu has said that Israel is now at war with Hamas, promising a massive counter-attack in the coming days and weeks.

Rather than focus on Hamas, however, Trump, speaking to a pro-Trump organization in Florida on Wednesday, instead praised the Lebanon-based group Hezbollah as “very smart.” He argued its intelligence was one reason why American officials were wrong to publicly voice concern about the Lebanon-based group attacking Israel’s northern border.

The United States and other governments consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization, and it has been involved in armed conflict with Israel for decades

Later in his speech, Trump also lambasted Netanyahu over what he said was a prior difference of opinion between the two leaders when the Republican was president. The Israeli prime minister, Trump said, declined to participate in a U.S. operation that killed Qassim Suleimani, a top Iranian military official, in 2020.

“I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down,” Trump said. “That was a terrible thing.”

In response to the criticism, Trump officials pointed to repeated statements of support for Israel in other parts of his speech, including touting his decision as president to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem while declaring that no group would attack the Middle Eastern country if he were still president.

“I fought for Israel like no president in history,” Trump said during Wednesday’s campaign speech.

But his comments nonetheless were starkly different from how politicians have traditionally responded to moments of crisis, when they refrain from offering praise of the country’s perceived adversaries while keeping criticisms of allies out of public view. President Joe Biden, for his part, has struck a deeply different tone than Trump this week, offering his full support to Netanyahu while unreservedly condemning any group that attacked Israeli citizens.

A spokesman for the Israeli government, Shlomo Karhi, criticized Trump on Thursday for his remarks.

“It’s a shame that such a person, the former president of the United States, assists in propaganda and disseminating things that harm the spirit of IDF fighters and the spirit of Israel’s residents,” Karhi told a local Israeli TV station, according to Haaretz. (McClatchy independently confirmed the authenticity of the spokesman’s comments.)

In a statement, a White House spokesman said that although it does not comment specifically on the 2024 presidential race, no American should take Trump’s position.

“Statements like this are dangerous and unhinged,” said White House spokesman Andrew Bates. “It’s completely lost on us why any American would ever praise an Iran-backed terrorist organization as ‘smart.’ Or have any objection to the United States warning terrorists not to attack Israel. Especially now as Israel is fighting back against one of the worst acts of mass murder in the country’s history. This is a time for all of us to stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel against ‘unadulterated evil.’ That’s what the President is doing as commander in chief.”

Trump this year has again emerged as a strong front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, leading a group of conservative rivals, including DeSantis, by as many as 40 percentage points in many national polls of the race.

McClatchy Senior National Security and White House Correspondent Michael Wilner contributed to this report.