WASHINGTON — Even as Donald Trump prepares for a second week of absence from his criminal trial in New York, the pace of global events outside the courthouse remains dizzying. As time goes on, the former president will face new questions about his administration’s plans if he returns to the White House in November.

To get Trump’s perspective on the crisis in the Middle East, two Tel Aviv-based journalists Israel Hayom A remarkable and unexpected scoop was secured last month thanks to the intervention of the newspaper’s owners. Miriam Adelson is a billionaire donor to the Republican Party and, like her late husband, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, close to Trump . At her request, the former president allowed her reporters to conduct live interviews at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

They traveled there hoping to hear support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the attack on Gaza. Instead, in what the newspaper called a “no-holds-barred” interview, they presented new evidence of Trump’s growing hostility toward the Israeli leader.

“You have to end your war,” the 77-year-old said. “You have to get it done…Israel has to be very careful because you are losing a lot of the world, a lot of support…You have to move towards peace that allows Israel and others to live a normal life”.

Reporters were surprised to find that Trump was taking positions that were at odds with those of most Republicans on Capitol Hill. There is no gap between them and Israeli leaders, and few Republicans have publicly urged Netanyahu to end the matter and end it in Gaza.

The sources of tension between Trump and Netanyahu were revealed last October. Five days after Hamas attacked Israel, Trump claimed in a campaign speech that Israeli leaders “let us down” on the eve of a military operation to assassinate Iranian Quds Force commander Gen. Qasem Soleimani, Suleima. General Ni was assassinated in Baghdad on Trump’s orders. January 3, 2020.

“We’re ready,” Trump told a crowd of supporters in Florida. “The night before it happened, I got a call saying that Israel would not be involved in the attack.

“We did it ourselves with absolute precision…and then Bibi tried to take credit for it.”

“I will never forget this,” added the former president, whose angry memories also included Netanyahu’s earlier decision to congratulate Joe Biden on winning the keys to the White House and deny Trump’s claims that the 2016 election was rigged wrong statement.

Observers often describe Trump’s expected foreign policy plans as “transactional.” The former president judges world leaders by how loyal they show him, whether he considers them friendly (China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un are “friends,” but Netanyahu is not), and whether the U.S. There is a trade deficit with the United States. Problematic country (a major negative in Trump’s mind).

He insisted that the crisis in the Middle East could have been avoided if he had been in the Oval Office. “If I were president, this would never happen,” he said, although he offered no justification for that claim other than to infer that Hamas would never have dared launch the Oct. 7 attack.

Trump’s surrogates predict that despite his recent comments, he will always support Israel. “At the end of the day, Israel needs the United States and the United States needs Israel. This is the only true democracy in the Middle East,” former State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said recently of the rightward shift news nation television.

“In the Trump administration, we reward Israel and the Gulf Arab states, and we punish the Islamic Republic of Iran,” she said, suggesting a similarly binary approach could be in store for Trump in his second term.

But senior analysts of U.S. relations in the Middle East say predicting Trump’s moves is by definition a highly imprecise art.

“One of the premises of the Trump administration is that the president will be the only one who truly makes decisions based on his own internal calculations rather than what his advisers tell him,” said Jon Altman, senior vice president and director of the Center for Washington Eastern Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Altman, one of the nation’s most senior observers of Iran-Israel tensions, wondered whether Trump would surprise everyone.

“It is possible that we may return to a policy of maximum pressure on Tehran,” he said. “But it’s also possible that, just as Trump decided to negotiate with Kim Jong Un, he will also try to negotiate with the Iranians.”

He claimed that the idea of ​​Tehran seeking to engage with Trump “has been percolating in Iran for quite some time…I can tell you that the former foreign minister of Iran told me that the advice he got from the North Koreans was to engage Trump directly.” …

“I don’t know anyone in America who would bet their house that when Donald Trump has the opportunity to reach a historic negotiated deal with the Iranians, he won’t decide to explore it.”

Fascinatingly, Trump could one day be romanced by Iran’s supreme leader after boasting about exchanging “love letters” with the North Korean strongman. As for Trump’s relationship with Israel, Altman similarly believes anything is possible.

“He didn’t say a bunch of crazy things,” he said. “He’s letting people fill in the blanks in any way they want… It shows that maybe Donald Trump is a more skilled politician now than anyone gave him credit for in 2016…

“I think he can pick it up … and take it wherever he wants to go.”