Trump offers no Gaza insight
In the five months since Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on Oct. 7, igniting the most divisive foreign policy crisis of the Biden presidency, Donald Trump has said little about the subject.
He criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, before quickly retreating to more standard expressions of support for the country. And he has made blustery claims the invasion never would have happened had he been president. But his overall approach has been laissez-faire.
“So you have a war that’s going on, and you’re probably going to have to let this play out. You’re probably going to have to let it play out, because a lot of people are dying,” Trump said in an interview with Univision a month after the attack. His main advice to Netanyahu and the Israelis, he said then, was to do a better job with “public relations,” because the Palestinians were “beating them at the public relations front.”
Trump’s hands-off approach to the bloody Middle East conflict reflects the profound anti-interventionist shift he has brought about in the Republican Party over the past eight years and has been colored by his feelings about Netanyahu, whom he may never forgive for congratulating President Joe Biden for his 2020 victory.
Trump has offered no criticisms of Biden’s response to the Hamas invasion and Israel’s retaliation in the Gaza Strip. Instead, he pinned the blame for the crisis on Biden’s “weakness,” in the same way he often does when tragedy occurs.
“You would have never had the problem that you just had, the horrible problem where Israel — Oct. 7, where Israel was so horribly attacked,” the former president told a crowd in Rock Hill, South Carolina, on Feb. 23, before switching to more practiced attack lines against Biden.
It is unimaginable that in a pre-Trump Republican Party, the standard-bearer would have had so little to say about a major terrorist attack against Israel and a broadening regional conflict in the middle of a presidential campaign.
“This is one of America’s closest allies under attack. And it’s stunning that ... you have heard so little from Trump,” said John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump who became a sharp critic of him and who has long been hawkish in support of Israel.
Yet people close to Trump, who leads Biden in polls, feel little if any urgency for him to put out more detailed foreign policy plans — about Israel or any other matter.
In 2016, Trump gave one major speech and a number of interviews about foreign policy. But it is unclear whether he will do the same in this campaign. He has a record in office to point to now. And when it comes to supporting Israel, his advisers see that record as unimpeachable.
“President Trump did more for Israel than any American president in history, and he took historic action in the Middle East that created unprecedented peace,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for his campaign. She added, “When President Trump is back in the Oval Office, Israel will once again be protected, Iran will go back to being broke, terrorists will be hunted down, and the bloodshed will end.”
Moreover, Trump has faced no dissent within his party over his stance on Israel and Gaza.