US midterms: Not even Trump's Israel aid stunt could rescue the Republicans

There is nothing particularly unusual about an election stunt. Politicians routinely perform them. Rarely, though, is a stunt as obvious as the one US President Donald Trump pulled on 3 November, Election Day, when he announced that America would, at year's end, stop providing $4bn in annual military aid to Israel. Trump had clearly read the room, and the polls. For all his public disdain for polls he claims are "fake" or "rigged", the president understands their political significance. Polling data suggests that American voters are increasingly uncomfortable contributing their tax dollars to Israel's military, particularly as costs rise in the US and Americans struggle to afford basic necessities. An August Marquette Law School poll, for example, found that 52 percent of American adults believe Washington provides Israel with too much military aid. Only 16 percent said it provides too little. Even among Republicans under 30, 54 percent said Washington gives Israel too much. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Appearing on Fox & Friends that morning, Trump asked why Republicans should "suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayed", a reference to Abdul El-Sayed, who hours later would become the first Muslim elected to the US Senate. Funding for Israel, Trump said, had become "a bad talking point" for Republicans. The admission was remarkable, and it demonstrated, perhaps more clearly than anything else, the extent to which a mainstay of American foreign policy has turned into an electoral liability. Trump's funding cut declaration should be seen for what it was: a desperate, last-ditch attempt to rescue the sinking Republican midterm ship, a political life jacket thrown to Republican candidates running for governorships, the Senate and the House of Representatives. It did not work. The election results look less like a blue wave than a blue tsunami. Democrats gained control of both chambers of Congress, flipping at least seven Republican-held Senate seats and winning important governorships, including in Texas, where a Democrat will govern for the first time in more than three decades. Why the stunt failed Why did Trump's bold attempt to save the midterms for Republicans fail so miserably? There are at least two reasons. First, the midterms were not simply a referendum on Israel. An announcement about aid to Israel, even a significant one, was never going to erase broader American concerns about the economy, the war on Iran, the state of democracy, immigration policy, racism and other issues, some of which overlap. Second, and perhaps more importantly, many Americans likely recognised that Trump's announcement was nothing more than a stunt. Almost as soon as Trump made his declaration, scholars, journalists, activists, and political commentators expressed doubts about various aspects of the supposed aid cut. Academic Marc Owen Jones said only "gullible" people would believe Trump's announcement. The annual aid package represents only a relatively small part of Washington's overall military support for Israel The journalist Glenn Greenwald noted that the US provides Israel with significantly more than $4bn in annual military aid. The commentator Ana Kasparian suggested that a new provision in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is moving Israel's military into more of a direct partnership with the US military. These cautions are important. America's $4bn annual military aid package to Israel only scratches the surface of overall US military support for the country. Brown University's Costs of War project estimated that Washington provided $21.7bn in military aid to Israel in the two years following 7 October 2023, while spending up to a further $12bn on military operations in the wider Middle East. In other words, the annual aid package represents only a relatively small part of Washington's overall military support for Israel. The package is also not Trump's alone to cancel. The $3.8bn a year Israel currently receives is set by a 10-year, $38bn memorandum of understanding signed under Barack Obama in 2016 and running to 2028, and it is Congress, not the president, that appropriates it each year. Beyond annual aid Kasparian's point about the NDAA is worth pausing over. The version of the 2027 NDAA passed by the House in July includes a provision, Section 219, that establishes a "United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative". The provision would deepen cooperation between the American and Israeli military establishments, including joint training exercises and information sharing on jointly developed technologies. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie warned on the eve of the vote that the House was about "to merge our military technology and supply chains with Israel's". The legislation does not formally merge the American and Israeli armed forces. More formal, more intense cooperation in these sensitive areas nonetheless represents a move towards greater interdependence. For Israel, the much smaller nation, such interdependence would be invaluable. A letter from 56 civil rights and advocacy groups, including Amnesty International, has described the provision as "exceptionally dangerous". Set against that support, cooperation and integration, the $4bn in annual military aid looks modest. Buried in the new defence budget, a plan to merge the US and Israeli militaries Read More » It is noteworthy, too, that Trump said he had made the decision to cut annual military aid to Israel in concert with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In an October interview, days before an election in which he lost his governing majority, Netanyahu indicated that US financial support would slow. "If you think we're going to continue receiving ... tens of billions of dollars in American aid ... it won't happen, because America has changed," he said. Israel's defence ministry announced in June that formal talks had begun on replacing the memorandum with a "completely reciprocal partnership" built on joint research, development and co-production. Section 219, then, raises an important question: could the Trump-Netanyahu agreement involve replacing direct annual military assistance with deeper defence cooperation? After all, greater integration of American and Israeli defence would be more consequential than $4bn. Importantly, this would also be a way of maintaining US support for Israel amid declining support from American liberals and, increasingly, among American conservatives. An unravelling consensus That declining support is becoming more difficult to ignore. For decades, unconditional support for Israel was a given in American politics, the one issue on which Democrats and Republicans reliably agreed. The Washington consensus about Israel is unravelling. A February Gallup poll found that more Americans now sympathise with Palestinians than Israelis. The poll showed that among young Americans, the gap in Palestinian-Israeli support is substantial: about half sympathise more with Palestinians and a quarter with Israelis. On 15 July, 103 House Democrats joined Massie in voting to block $3.3bn in military aid to Israel. There is evidence that the growing discontent extends beyond American liberals. Prominent conservatives, including Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens, Matt Walsh and a host of others, have become vocal critics of both Israel and America's support for it. Even Vice President JD Vance has grown increasingly critical of Israel. In recent months, he has made several provocative statements about Israel and the US-Israel relationship. In June, he lambasted Israel, warning that the country had almost no friends left in the world. Vance then said in September that US foreign policy should not be "subservient to the state of Israel". On 4 November, the morning after the vote, Vance posted a lengthy midterm commentary on X, outlining what he considers the four primary reasons why Republicans lost. Citing polling data, Vance said that Americans who had abandoned the Republicans identified four changes that could bring them back: ending the war on Iran, controlling inflation, putting America first and changing "our relationship to Israel". "The reason we lost is the war," he wrote. "The president himself said so last night." Vance's admission is a bombshell. Only hours after a major electoral defeat, the sitting Republican vice president admitted that America's "relationship to Israel" had become a political liability. In Israel, too, one journalist commented that his country had "suffered a very serious blow" in the midterms because Israel "was on the ballot". A growing body of polling data, the public positions of influential American conservatives and Vance's own criticisms of Israel suggest that a true reckoning for the American-Israeli relationship is coming soon. Trump's election day stunt may have been an acknowledgement that the reckoning has already started. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.