HUMILIATED

Trump Frantically Backpedals After Ally Snubs His Public Plea

The president claimed he’s “calling the shots” on Iran before the Israeli PM showed otherwise.

Donald Trump spectacularly flip-flopped on his pleas for calm in the Middle East after Israel blanked him and charged ahead with a fresh wave of strikes on Iran anyway.

“We had a very good conversation,” the president told reporters late Monday—from the tarmac in New York, where he had attended an NBA finals game—of a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier in the day.

“He was hit, and he hit back, and I can’t blame him for that—but now they have called it quits,” he went on. “They’re gonna leave each other alone, for… another week, or something.”

The president then bizarrely claimed the conflict had been going on for “you could say, about 3,000 years.” He insisted that after all that time, “we’re now in the final throes of what will be a very good deal,” which could now be signed “within two or three days.”

He concluded by saying he had told Netanyahu he wanted him “to do what’s right” over the weekend’s attacks, but to end them “as quickly as you can, because it has to stop” and “we want to get it finished.”

Trump struck a very different tone in those comments from others he made over the weekend, after Tehran launched missiles at Israel in retaliation for Israel’s attacks on Iranian-allied Hezbollah targets in Beirut, Lebanon—which Trump said he was “not happy” about and had not been coordinated with the U.S.

Speaking with the Financial Times, Trump insisted Sunday that “I call the shots” in the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran, and that he’d be calling Netanyahu to “tell him not to retaliate” to the Islamist regime’s response to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon.

“Each of them had their fun,” he added in comments to Axios. “Israel had its strike, and Iran had its strike. We don’t need another one.”

Netanyahu appears to have thought otherwise, moving ahead with retaliatory strikes on Iran on Monday morning. Trump, in addition to his comments on the tarmac in New York that night, outright denied that the Israeli PM had defied him in a call with the BBC.

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“No, no, they had already gone,” he said of Israel’s latest round of attacks. “They had already gone, they were already on their way,” he went on, adding: “If I tell him to do something, he does it.”

Both Iran and Israel have since said they will hold off on further attacks, which had threatened to shatter a delicate ceasefire in place since April, even as each warned they would respond with force if the other violated the terms of that stay in hostilities again.

Trump, meanwhile, continues to insist a lasting peace is within reach. “We’re very close to signing a very powerful deal, a very good deal,” he told the BBC.

The president’s political opponents have repeatedly accused him of launching the war on Iran at Netanyahu’s behest. The former CIA officer Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in March over what he claimed was Trump’s decision to launch the war under pressure “from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

The Trump administration is investigating Kent for allegedly leaking classified information. The status of negotiations for an end to the conflict remains uncertain, with Trump claiming the talks have gone “very well” while Iran’s foreign minister reports “no significant progress.”

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.

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