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Trump-Netanyahu Friendship Tested as US Pursues Deal With Iran 88%
By MIKE CATALINI28% THOMAS BEAUMONT55%
6/16/2026, 11:00:50 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Negativity Bias, with Unattributed Quote as the most egregious example at 23.5% saturation with 162 hits. Analysis detected 1,487 faulty-reasoning hits from 690 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 80.3% and a BS Rank of 88% (2,766 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 87.40% of the article peer group.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told President Donald Trump last year that he was the "greatest friend Israel ever had in the White House."
Now, as Trump tries to finalize a deal to end the war with Iran, he's directing rhetoric toward Netanyahu the likes of which no other American leader has dared to use publicly.
He claimed credit for Israel's existence — "without me, there would be no Israel" — and questioned his judgment in interviews.
He even described him as "crazy."
Netanyahu's tenure as prime minister spans four U.S. presidents, and he's frustrated all of them at one point or another.
But none has voiced that as openly as Trump, who started the Iran conflict in lockstep with Netanyahu.
The tension comes as Trump criticizes recent Israeli attacks in Lebanon, which have threatened to jeopardize negotiations between Washington and Tehran.
Iran officials have said a new deal aimed at ending the U.S.-Iran conflict requires that Israel withdraw from Lebanon, where it has been battling Iran-backed Hezbollah militants and seizing swaths of that country.
Israeli officials, in turn, have rejected the notion, a stance that threatens efforts to end the Iran war.
Those efforts have become a powerful focus for Trump as he looks to end a war that has sown discord at home and driven up fuel costs.
"If Netanyahu gets in between something Trump really wants, and that's out of this war, he's prepared to use the leverage that he has," said Aaron David Miller, who served as an adviser on Middle East issues to Democrat and Republican administrations over two decades.
An agreement is scheduled to be signed on Friday in Geneva.
Speaking on Tuesday at the annual G7 summit in France, Trump said he told Netanyahu that he's been unhappy with his recent moves.
"Without the U.S., there would be no Israel.
Without me, there would be no Israel because no other president was willing to do what I did," Trump said.
"I have had a great relationship with Bibi.
Now Bibi has to be more responsible with respect to Lebanon."
There has long been a bipartisan consensus around supporting Israel in Washington, but that has frayed in recent years.
Liberals have been increasingly critical of Israel's actions toward Palestinians, especially during the war in Gaza, and conservatives have questioned the importance of longstanding American support for Israel.
There are concerns about antisemitism on the left and the right.
Trump's latest comments drew swift criticism from some left-leaning groups.
"He is framing Israel's mere existence as contingent on him," said Halie Soifer, who leads the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
"It's deeply offensive to the vast majority of Jews who care about Israel's future."
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris often disagreed with Netanyahu during the war in Gaza, and sometimes they criticized him publicly.
But they were more circumspect, in an effort to avoid facing accusations of being anti-Israel.
Meanwhile, conservative, pro-Israel groups were divided on the seriousness of Trump's public condemnation of Netanyahu.
Republican Jewish Coalition President Matt Brooks described Trump's criticism as little more than the inevitable disagreement among family members.
Brooks said Trump has been reliably supportive of Israel as president.
"If Biden or Harris said something critical, it came from the position of someone who was hostile toward or didn't have the same level of support for Israel that President Trump has," Brooks said.
He noted the first Trump administration's role in moving the U.S.
Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the return of Israeli hostages from Gaza during the president's second term, among other acts.
Biden had criticized Netanyahu's handling of the war in Gaza, though Trump's criticism of Netanyahu comes with a "tremendous reservoir of goodwill on this issue that neither Biden nor Harris ever had."
Pro-Israel advocate Mort Klein. president of the conservative Zionist Organization of America, said he worried that Trump was making the comments in public to appeal to Israel critics "because he sees that Americans have become more hostile toward Israel than they've ever been."
"That worries me," Klein said.
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