OP-ED: DAY 628 OF THE WAR
When the US president helped save Israel, then went ballistic on its leadership
With those three strikes on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities,Trump might also just have helped save humanity. But he and only he will decide if and when he needs to do it again
By DAVID HOROVITZ
25 Jun 2025, 4:26
(This is called Gratitude in the Jewish Faith. They did it to Moses daily for 40 years)
Talking to reporters on the White House lawn first thing Tuesday morning, Donald Trump let loosewhat may well have been the most bitter public denunciation of Israel by an American president since, well, ever.
Over and over, and over, and over, he savaged Israel’s leadership for ostensibly breaching the ceasefire he had brokered with Iran (which Israel hadn’t, but was about to), for having “dropped a load of bombs the likes of which I’ve never seen before” on Iran before the ceasefire came into effect, and generally for acting like ingrates after he had dispatched B-2 bombers to “obliterate” Iran’s three key nuclear facilities, notably including the near-impregnable Fordo.
Trump did critique Iran, too, just a little, and he made both countries the subject of his concluding F-bomb: “You know what? We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Do you understand that?”
But the overwhelming weight of his barrage was directed at Israel, generally regarded as America’s closest ally in the region, which had lost four more civilians hours earlier in a pre-ceasefire missile attack — a missile attack by the US-loathing, would-be Israel-destroying Islamic extremist regime in Tehran, which had continued to fire missiles immediately after the truce was meant to have begun at 7 am, and again more than three hours later. It was to the latest Iranian barrage that Israel was about to respond, so infuriating the US president.
“I am not happy with Israel,” he said, and repeated that “not happy” sentiment half a dozen times with minor variations, before heading off to a NATO summit in the Netherlands and phoning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu en route to demand that he turn Israel’s bombers around. “Do not drop those bombs,” Trump ordered, and a chastened Netanyahu indeed brought back the IAF’s jets, abandoning reported plans to attack 15 key regime targets, and going through with just one minor strike on a radar installation that caused no casualties.
Although his former chief strategist Steve Bannon assessed that Trump had been “as mad as I’ve ever seen the president of the United States,” and ascribed this to cumulative fury at “the many lies we’ve gotten from the Netanyahu government,” Trump seemed largely mollified just a few hours later, telling reporters there’d be no consequences for Israel because it ultimately “didn’t do anything” to violate the ceasefire. By Wednesday, he was praising the Israelis for scaling back the retaliation — “I was so proud of them” — and acknowledging that “technically they were right” to claim that Iran had breached the ceasefire with its morning missile fire. “It was a little bit of a violation.”
But the lashing on the lawn underlined, for all the world to see, the acute risk of getting on the wrong side of President Donald J. Trump, even when you consider yourself to be among his closest allies, even when you have been thanked and congratulated by him just a short time before, and even when you’re not entirely sure what it is you are supposed to have done or be doing wrong.
That risk is now overtly ever-present for Israel,which always took pride in defending itself by itself from its would-be destroyers, but in this case had energetically lobbied the Trump administration to come to its aid. Only the US had the Massive Ordnance Penetrator bunker-busters capable of penetrating Fordo, and the B-2s to carry them. And Fordo, where advanced centrifuges could quickly convert highly enriched uranium to weapons grade, had to be penetrated if the advancing Iranian nuclear weapons threat was to be averted.
Days after those three American strikes, it is not definitively clear that the Iranian nuclear program is out.Trump is adamant that the regime’s main nuclear facilities are completely destroyed, and has warned that more attacks will follow if “the bully of the Middle East” doesn’t get the message and “now make peace.” Other assessments are more cautious. The Israeli army says the Iranians have been set back years. A preliminary US intel report is said to assess that would-be Iranian bombmaking has been delayed by only by months. Nobody knows for sure what has become of Iran’s 400kg stockpile of enriched uranium.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/when-the-us-president-helped-save-israel-then-went-ballistic-on-its-leadership/