Oh, to be a fly on the effing wall during this effing call.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump confirmed to the New York Post’s Miranda Devine on the podcast “Pod Force One” that he did go off on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an “expletive-laden” phone call previously reported by Axios.
Screenshot The New York Post/”Pod Force One with Miranda Devine”
“Now Axios reported that you had a phone call with Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, in which you were angry with him,” Devine began. “You said, ‘Are you effing crazy? What are you effing doing? I helped you stay out of jail.’ Is that true? Did you speak to him in those terms?”
“I did,” Trump said. “I wouldn’t say angry. I was a little bit perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon.”
He continued, “You know, at some point I said, ‘Bibi, we gotta stop this. We gotta stop it.’”
Trump went on to note that the two leaders “have a very good relationship.”
Win McNamee via Getty Images
“We’ve done well together,” Trump said. “He always says we could never have done it, but everybody knows that we could have never done it without the United States. But we’ve worked very well together.”
He added, “I like Bibi a lot and I’ve worked very well with him. We had where, you know, where I’m a wartime president, he’s a wartime prime minister. Very important part of the world, and I think we’ve done, you know, very well.”
Axios reported Monday that Trump’s call to Netanyahu was prompted by Iran threatening to pull out of peace negotiations with the U.S. over Israel’s actions against Lebanon. A source, who is cited as an unnamed U.S. official, summarized to the outlet that Trump told Netanyahu: “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now.”
In response to the report, an unnamed senior official on Netanyahu’s team told Israeli outlet N12 Tuesday that the Axios report was “inaccurate” and denied certain “personal remarks” allegedly made by Trump.
“Instead, the tense call focused on conflicting social media posts,” Amit Segal, chief political analyst at N12, wrote on X. “Trump felt Netanyahu implied the war was continuing at full intensity, while Netanyahu felt Trump implied a total ceasefire.”
