Shocking Trump Announcement on Election Day

President Donald Trump made a shocking announcement that could have massive implications for Election Day. The Trump Administration will no longer provide $4 billion annually in military aid to Israel. Trump said that he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reached this agreement “months ago.”

As reported by Fox News:

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that U.S. aid to Israel would end at the close of the year, arguing that the country no longer needs the assistance and can purchase its own weapons.

“We were giving them $4 billion – we are – but it gets cut off at the end of the year,” Trump told “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday in an Election Day morning announcement.

Trump acknowledged the political nature of the news, pointing to Michigan’s battleground Senate race between Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers.

Honestly, this announcement coming at this particular time makes me a bit nervous. And that apprehension has less to do with the idea of ending financial aid to Israel, as there have been talks, including from Prime Minister Netanyahu himself, saying this was what he wanted. But he spoke more about phasing out the funding over the next decade, not all at once.

So President Trump’s announcement this morning that aid would end by the end of the year feels more like a knee-jerk reaction. It’s especially concerning because it comes on Election Day, and the reasoning behind it is at least partially politically motivated in response to the rise of people like Abdul El-Sayed.

When Fox’s Brian Kilmeade asked why he was going to end this funding to Israel, President Trump gave a blunt answer and brought up that it is also a way to silence critics like El-Sayed, stating:

Because they don’t need it, Brian. I mean, I asked them, because they don’t need it, and because why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don’t need it? It’s a bad talking point.

And that’s the part I find deeply concerning. When he says it’s about “lunatics” like El-Sayed, I can’t help but feel that it’s actually a win for the El-Sayeds as well as the Tucker Carlsons of the world, at least rhetorically, because now they can say they’ve successfully moved the goalposts. I fear the El-Sayeds and their anti-Israel supporters will point to this move as a win, or at least proof that they were right all along.

The head of ACLJ Jerusalem, Jeff Ballabon, joined the broadcast from Israel with his reaction to this shocking announcement:

There are two ways to look at this. There’s a half full, and there’s a half empty, and the truth is it’s a mixture of both. On the one hand, I’ve been opposed to the way American aid goes to Israel, the way it’s been structured, for decades, since I worked on Capitol Hill. I think that it’s created and calculated in a way that helps some domestic lobbying groups pitch their value, but in terms of Israel’s own value, it creates a very bad dynamic. It’s as though Israel is begging for alms as opposed to actually working hand in hand with America to create great new arms for both countries.

And the fact is that the money flows back to America anyway. It shouldn’t be structured as foreign aid. Frankly, some of it should come out of defense authorization on its own merits when it deserves to. And more importantly, Israel realized now that it can’t really be this reliant, and this is not a new thing. Netanyahu, when he was Prime Minister already in 1996, more than 30 years ago . . . the summer he came to a joint session of Congress. He addressed them, and he said he wanted to wean Israel off American foreign aid. I mean, it’s been decades that Israel’s wanted to do this, and it was more the input of domestic American groups that wanted to focus on this because it was good for them. And it has not been good for Israel.

That said, I agree with your analysis that the timing of this is awkward because it clearly looks as though it’s arriving not just from pressure on the far Left, but also on the far Right. That does create [for] Israel this image of something between either manipulating America and/or being weak and not worthy of America. Both narratives are terrible. I think it’s a short-term hit to the narrative, but long-term a much better situation in terms of Israel and America as allies and partners.

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, the optics of this announcement, particularly on Election Day, appear to be a move to win an election on a very particular issue and one that we have been concerned about for a long time.

Today’s Sekulow broadcast included more analysis of President Trump’s announcement that the United States will stop sending aid annually to Israel, our election integrity work, and more.

Watch the full broadcast below: