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Trump sends mixed messages on Mideast policy in final days of campaign
The former president is employing often-contradictory appeals to win over pro-Israel conservatives, America First isolationists and Arab voters
With just days left in the presidential race, the Trump campaign is honing its closing pitch to voters — and employing contradictory language to appeal simultaneously to traditionally hawkish pro-Israel Republicans, America First isolationists and Muslim and Arab American voters disillusioned with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ approach to the Middle East.
Rhetoric used by former President Donald Trump, his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and other figures close to the campaign has painted Harris as a pro-war establishment figure, zeroing in on her recent campaign appearances with former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), who lost her seat after she voted to impeach Trump in 2021.
Trump, meanwhile, has sought to portray himself as the pro-peace candidate in the race, pushing an ambiguous message about bringing peace to the Middle East while offering few policy proposals.
“Kamala is campaigning with Muslim-hating warmonger Liz Cheney, who wants to invade practically every Muslim country on the planet. And let me tell you, the Muslims of our country, they see it and they know it,” Trump said Saturday night at a rally in Novi, Mich., where he touted endorsements from several Muslim leaders in the state. “Her father was responsible for invading the Middle East, killing millions of Arabs. Millions. And this is the one that Kamala is campaigning with.”
While Trump has touted the pro-Israel record of his first term, he has also repeatedly stated that he thinks Israel’s war with Hamas and Hezbollah needs to end quickly. According to The Times of Israel, Trump has told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that if he wins, he wants the war to be over by the time he takes office in January.
The former president faced criticism from some Jewish Republican backers in September when he declined to weigh in after Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. On Saturday, Trump wrote a letter to the Lebanese American community pledging to “stop the suffering and destruction in Lebanon,” with no mention of Hezbollah.
Trump’s more hawkish backers point to the personnel who served under him in his first term — people such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and National Security Advisor John Bolton — as an indication of how he would govern in a second term. But Bolton has fallen out of favor with Trump, and it’s not clear whether Trump would staff up his foreign policy team this time around with like-minded officials from the Republican foreign policy establishment or people more aligned with an America First worldview. (Former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., called out Bolton by name at Trump’s Sunday night Madison Square Garden rally.)
“It’s like going into a casino where, when you go in with Kamala Harris, you’re guaranteed to lose, and when you go in with Donald Trump, you’re either going to win really big or you’re going to lose really badly. That’s sort of the way I see this election playing out with respect to Iran and Israel,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies CEO Mark Dubowitz said in an interview.
Dubowitz outlined two possible scenarios. In the first, which resembles Trump’s first term, Trump goes “all-in” on renegotiating a $38 billion memorandum of understanding with Israel and exerting “maximum pressure” on Iran.
“The lose-badly [situation] is Trump, for whatever reason, he tells Bibi, immediately, ‘Wrap it all up. I don’t want to see any more violence and escalation,’” Dubowitz speculated. “The Supreme Leader [of Iran] senses an opportunity to rope-a-dope the Americans, and Trump does a nuclear deal with Khamenei, which is worse than the 2015 Obama deal, but he calls it the best deal ever negotiated,” Dubowitz said, suggesting that Iran could goad Trump into a nuclear deal.
In September, Trump said he would be open to negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran. He has also said recently that Iran would have joined the Abraham Accords — normalizing ties with Israel — in a second Trump term, although Iran has given no indication that it would do so.
In a recent podcast interview, Vance also appeared to take a less hawkish approach to Iran than the one that characterized the first Trump administration, arguing that Israel and the U.S. do not always have “overlapping interests” when it comes to war in the Middle East. “Our interest, I think very much, is in not going to war with Iran, right? It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country,” Vance said.
Republicans have said that the Trump campaign’s messaging — despite attacking foreign policy hawks who were once a central part of the GOP — does not signal a shift in how Trump would actually approach the Middle East as president. At a Monday event in Michigan, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), the Republican Senate candidate running against Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), told Jewish voters that efforts to win over Muslim voters will not come at the cost of his support for Israel.
“We’re trying to do outreach in the Muslim community, but I also tell them where I’m at,” Rogers said at a Republican Jewish Coalition event. “I never walk away from where I’m at on Israel, and let me tell you, the first 30 minutes are always a little bumpy.”
Danielle Pletka, a conservative foreign policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute and a Trump critic, said the Trump campaign’s outreach to Muslim voters unhappy with Harris and the Biden administration is just smart politics.
“They’re disgruntled, so they’re potential Trump voters,” Pletka said. “Does that mean that Trump’s fundamental pro-Israel position, or the de facto division between the parties, with the Republican Party being far more pro-Israel and the Democratic Party being far less pro-Israel — does that mean that’s going to change? No.”
Still, Pletka added, Trump’s recent messaging on foreign policy reflects the fact that “there is no guiding principle of leadership and foreign policy in Donald Trump’s mind.”
In the Trump era, Republicans like Vance who shifted away from the interventionism that has long characterized the Republican worldview still generally viewed Israel in a separate category. In May, Vance gave a speech at the isolationist Quincy Institute in Washington where he laid out the case for why American support for Israel is of paramount importance — unlike U.S. support for Ukraine or other longtime allies.
Similarly, Trump has generally stood by his pro-Israel record in his first term while also taking far more unconventional positions, such as praising authoritarian leaders elsewhere in the world. In his recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, for instance, Trump touted his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and said the “bigger problem” is “with the enemy from within.”
In the closing days of the campaign, Vance has also tried to appease both supporters of Israel and people concerned about the civilian toll of Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon. After Israel’s Knesset voted this week to ban UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinians, Vance did not directly answer a question about whether a Trump administration would support the ban on UNRWA or whether it would support sending greater humanitarian aid to Gaza.
“Let’s save as many Palestinian lives as possible but let’s not empower the terrorists who are murdering innocent Israelis. We can do both of those things at the same time,” Vance said, according to Politico.
Ultimately, the mixed messaging fits into a big-tent approach that Trump and Vance are pushing — with the hope that gestures of goodwill can stand in for policy commitments. (A Trump campaign spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)
Imam Belal Alzuhairi, a Muslim leader in Detroit who endorsed Trump, said he wants to focus on the future rather than Trump’s past support for Israel.
“I would, especially now, like to talk about the present and future. I don’t want to talk about the past, now that he is trying to extend his hand to us. The fact that he is meeting us, he is listening to us attentively, I think this is a good gesture,” Alzuhairi told a local TV station. “And this is something we can build upon.”
At Madison Square Garden, Trump did not discuss any concrete policies about the Middle East, beyond his now-routine statement that the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks “would never, ever have happened” if he were president and that he “will stop the chaos in the Middle East.” Instead, he offered a paean to diversity.
“Jews and Muslims and Catholics and evangelicals and Mormons, they’re all joining our cause in large numbers, larger than anyone has ever seen in this country before, larger than they’ve ever seen in any country,” said Trump. “The Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion, and that’s something very nice about that.”