特朗普政府可能正在损害以色列本已受损的声誉

How the Trump administration could be hurting Israel’s already damaged brand

Analysis by Aaron Blake
3 hr ago
PUBLISHED Mar 19, 2026, 4:00 PM ET

The Middle East Donald Trump Oil & gas Fighting disinformation

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President Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office on Thursday, during a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.

Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg/Getty Images

President Donald Trump joined with Israel to launch the Iran war at an inauspicious time for the US-Israeli relationship.

Just a day before the first strikes, Gallup polling had shown Americans’ views of Israel hitting a 21st century low; most strikingly, Americans for the first time didn’t sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians.

Making matters even more fraught, the right has in recent months become riven over how to deal with what many regard as a troubling rise in antisemitism in its base and influencer class. Some of the biggest names in conservative thought have increasingly — and often conspiratorially — linked Israel to all manner of American maladies.

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Given Americans seemed quite skeptical of this war from the jump, it didn’t take an active imagination to surmise that some people would blame Israel and even craft conspiracy theories about that.

And that’s certainly happened. But, in a twist, that’s thanks in large part to some of the Trump administration’s rhetoric about the war.

The president and those around him have done Israel no favors with some of their claims.

On two major occasions now, the administration has gestured at Israel being mostly responsible for major inflection points in the war — even though the evidence on both counts isn’t totally clear.

Rubio’s claim about an ‘imminent’ Iranian threat

First, it was Secretary of State Marco Rubio making a kind of bank-shot case for why Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States. Rubio said Israel was going to strike Iran no matter what, and Iran was going to retaliate by striking at US targets; ipso facto, the argument went, Iran was an imminent threat to the United States.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio attends a meeting between President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

The political problem with this formulation, though, was that it sounded a lot like the United States government was having its hand forced by Israel.

So the Trump administration quickly abandoned that argument and moved on to another in its long line of justifications for the war.

Joe Kent’s resignation

But this week has showed how Israel’s PR problem is going nowhere.

On Tuesday, we learned that the first high-profile Trump administration official had resigned while citing the Iran war. But outgoing National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent didn’t just criticize the war; he heavily blamed “pressure from Israel and its powerful lobby” for coercing the United States into it.

Kent in his resignation letter went on to repeatedly cite Israel and blame it for other wars, too. And in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, he played into conspiracy theories about Israel and the assassination of late conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

The reaction on much of the establishment right has largely been to dismiss Kent as an antisemitic crank. But this is someone Trump put in a powerful position — and did so despite his known past associations with extremists, including White nationalists and a Nazi sympathizer. And Kent is now using the credibility the administration vested in him to target Israel.

Trump’s latest claim

And finally came Trump’s bizarre missive late Wednesday night.

In a social media post at about 10 p.m. ET, he disclaimed any US role in the major Israeli attacks on facilities linked to the South Pars gas field in Iran.

“The United States knew nothing about this particular attack,” Trump maintained.

The attack was a big deal because Iran responded by striking Qatar’s portion of the gas field, raising tensions between neighbors in the region. (Trump also threatened to “massively blow up” Iran’s portion of the gas field if it keeps attacking Qatar.) And the gas field is the world’s largest, meaning its destruction could have an outsized impact on the already struggling global energy markets and supplies.

Smoke and fire rise near the South Pars gas field following an attack in Bushehr Province, Iran, on Wednesday, in this screengrab obtained from a social media video.

Reuters

The first thing to note is that Trump’s account has been contradicted. A US source has told CNN that the US was “aware” of the strike, and an Israeli source has said the two sides coordinated on the strike. (Other experts, including former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, have noted it would be shocking if Israel didn’t loop the United States in on an attack of this scale and significance.)

But setting that aside, Trump’s comments — much like Rubio’s — imply that Israel is singularly responsible for this escalation, and they cast the United States in a role of responding to that Israeli-imposed escalation.

Disclaiming involvement might serve Trump’s domestic political purposes, but it doesn’t help Israel’s reputation in the United States. If anything, Trump’s position that the US knew nothing feeds those harboring theories like Kent’s.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said Israel had “acted alone” in a strike on a processing facility linked to the South Pars gas field, without directly addressing whether the United States was aware of the operation beforehand.

Netanyahu also rejected the idea that Israel coerced the United States into the war, casting doubt that anyone could do that to Trump.

“This canard that we dragged the United States into it – it’s not just a canard; it’s ridiculous. It’s just ridiculous,” Netanyahu said at his news conference.

Uncomfortable questions

Trump seemed to double down on his claim on Thursday, telling reporters that the US and Israel were “independent” but “get along great.”

He said of Netanyahu: “It’s coordinated. But on occasion he’ll do something, and if I don’t like it, and so we’re not doing that anymore.”

But the situation is again posing uncomfortable questions for the administration.

At Thursday’s Pentagon briefing, a reporter for the right-wing website Gateway Pundit asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about Trump’s Wednesday Truth Social post.

“Why are we helping Israel prosecute this war, if they’re going to pursue their own objectives?” the reporter asked.

Hegseth didn’t address the substance of Trump’s post, instead offering vague assurances that US objectives were being met.

“We hold the cards. We have objectives. Those objectives are clear,” he responded. “We have allies pursuing objectives as well, and the truth speaks for itself.”

Later that morning, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was asked at a House intelligence committee hearing why Israel would strike Iranian energy infrastructure (purportedly) against Trump’s wishes.

“I don’t have an answer for that,” she responded.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testifies before a US House Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday.

Kylie Cooper/Reuters

Gabbard was then asked if Israel’s objectives aligned with the United States’, and she again appeared stumped. After a long pause, she said she was “thinking carefully” about what she could say publicly.

(She eventually acknowledged that Israel was more focused on taking out Iran’s leadership, while the United States was more focused on disarming Iran — both on the nuclear front and with its conventional weapons.)

Also at the hearing, CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed that what Rubio said had a real basis in US intelligence.

Ratcliffe said there was a “body of evidence” available that said, “in the likely event of a conflict between Iran and Israel, that the US would be immediately attacked — regardless of whether the United States stayed out of that conflict.”

This war was always going to be a tough sell with the American people and a real test of the US-Israeli relationship.

But through its inability to craft a consistent message and Trump’s tendency to say whatever might be expedient at the moment, the administration has made the latter portion of that equation even more complicated than it had to be.

American society — and Israel’s reputation — could be feeling the effects of that for a long time.

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