Trump’s silence on Israel’s Hezbollah attack draws Republican attention

Former President Donald Trump’s continued silence regarding Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday is drawing criticism in some pro-Israel Republican foreign policy circles, particularly as Vice President Kamala Harris soon personally voiced her approval of the stunning attack had after it happened.

Trump himself has not yet commented on the attack, nor has his running mate, Senator JD Vance (R-OH), who is currently preparing for his first and only debate with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz on Tuesday. Representatives for Vance declined to comment on the Nasrallah assassination attempt.

Meanwhile, a Trump campaign spokesman shared a statement three days after the massive Israeli airstrike in Lebanon that killed the top commander of Hezbollah, who led the Iran-backed terror group for more than three decades Jewish Insider on Monday which made no mention of the assassination but focused primarily on Harris while touting the former president’s pro-Israel record.

“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, we have had historic peace in the Middle East,” said Karoline Leavitt, a national press secretary for the Trump campaign. “Now all the progress President Trump has made in the region has been undone by the weakness of Kamala Harris and the America Last policy. With President Trump back in the Oval Office, Israel will be protected again, Iran will be broke again, terrorists will be hunted, the hostages will be brought home and the bloodshed will end.”

The statement was greeted with skepticism and even hostility by some conservative foreign policy hawks. They questioned why the campaign, which has often reacted cautiously to major events in the Middle East, had not attributed to Israel the killing of Nasrallah – long one of the country’s top military targets.

“There is no question that Donald Trump has been less squeamish about getting rid of terrorists and insulting Iran during his time in office,” said Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Joel Giederman, a pro-Israel donor who sits on the board of the Trump-backing Republican Jewish Coalition, was even more critical, calling the statement “pointless and unresponsive.”

The former president “should openly say that killing a bloodthirsty terrorist was a good thing,” Geiderman told JI. “America didn’t do it, Israel did.”

The statement was characteristic of Trump’s recent public comments on Israel and the broader Middle East, including repeated claims that the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks “would never have happened” if he had been president.

But the lack of a clear response to Israel’s killing of Nasrallah, which heralded an expected Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon, now raises questions about where Trump will land on key foreign policy issues, even as he continues to pointlessly attack Harris and President Joe Biden in the Middle East East.

Despite his aggressive anti-Iran policies as president, Trump made some eye-catching comments about the Middle East during his campaign that contradicted previous statements without spelling out how he would handle unrest in the region differently than the Biden administration.

Just last week, for example, the former president suggested he was open to talks with Iran about a renewed nuclear deal, which he himself ended while in office and which Biden wanted to revive.

The former president also recently met with Qatari leaders in Florida for a discussion that he posted on his Truth Social account — even as Republican lawmakers have attacked the Gulf kingdom for hosting Hamas.

And perhaps most notably, days after the Oct. 7 attacks, Trump sparked bipartisan backlash when he criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called Hezbollah “very smart” when it exchanged missiles with Israel. He soon walked back his comments and his campaign claimed his remarks had been misinterpreted.

But as Israel plotted a possible impending ground invasion of Lebanon on Monday, Trump had yet to confirm whether he agreed with his son-in-law and former senior adviser Jared Kushner, who in a lengthy social media post on Saturday hailed the assassination of Nasrallah as “the most important Day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords”.

“The right move for America now would be to tell Israel to finish the job in the war with Hezbollah,” Kushner said.

In a statement a day after the attack, Harris castigated Nasrallah as “a terrorist with American blood on his hands” and said his death had brought “a measure of justice to Hezbollah’s victims.”

But while Harris promised to “always support Israel’s right to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups,” the vice president, echoing Biden, warned of an escalation “into a broader regional war” and called for a “diplomatic solution “to “protect civilians and achieve lasting stability in the region.”

The assassination has drawn bipartisan support on the Hill, although many Republican lawmakers have also called on the White House to abandon its efforts to reach a ceasefire.

Trump, however, has not made clear how he feels about Israel’s military response to Hezbollah, even after JI asked his campaign on Monday whether he agreed with Kushner. A Republican foreign policy expert familiar with the Trump campaign said he had “no doubt” that the former president “thinks it’s great,” and attributed the “failure to say so” to what he called “poor personnel work”.

“I’ve been told that these campaign staff are the best ever, but I don’t see it happening when something like this happens – when they can’t respond quickly,” he told JI via email.

Before his campaign issued its statement to JI, some pro-Israel Republicans said they hadn’t even noticed that Trump had remained silent about Nasrallah’s death. “As strong a supporter of Israel as he was and promised to be, I had assumed that he had made a statement and would expect that he would make a very strong statement supporting Bibi’s action,” Fred Zeidman said , a leading GOP donor and RJC board member who used a nickname for Netanyahu, had spoken out about the attack shortly before the campaign.

In a statement to JI, Sam Markstein, an RJC spokesman, defended the Trump campaign’s delayed response and drew a sharp contrast with Harris.

“The difference between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is that the former is all talk and incompetence while the latter is action-oriented and strong,” he said Monday. “No one has been a better friend to the Jewish state or a greater deterrent to Iranian aggression than Trump, while Harris presided over an era of weakness, appeasement, and unprecedented enrichment and encouragement of terrorists in Tehran.” No amount of spin can change these facts. “

Barry Funt, another RJC board member and GOP donor, had a more measured response to Trump’s campaign statement on Monday, saying he was not concerned about its content and agreed with the premise – even if it made no reference to Nasrallah.

“With Trump, I always focus on what he does rather than what he says,” he told JI in an email, “so while others may be excited, I am neither disappointed nor surprised.”