President Donald Trump confirmed reporting that he had strong words for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, after Israel’s actions in Lebanon reportedly prompted Iran to threaten to end negotiations with the United States.
On Monday, Axios, citing two U.S. officials and a third source, reported that Trump was critical of Netanyahu during a phone call between the two.
“You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this,” Axios quoted one U.S. official as saying.
“A second source briefed on the call said Trump was ‘pissed’ and at one point yelled at Netanyahu: ‘What the fuck are you doing?’” the outlet reported.
During an interview with the New York Post’s Miranda Devine on Pod Force One, Devine asked if the report was true and if Trump spoke to Netanyahu in those terms.
“I did. I wouldn’t say angry. I was a little bit perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon, you know,” Trump said. “At some point I said, ‘Bibi, we gotta stop this, we gotta stop it.’”
Trump added that he has a “very good relationship” with Netanyahu and stressed, “We’ve done well together.”
“I like Bibi a lot, and I’ve worked very well with him,” he said.
“I’m a wartime president, and he’s a wartime prime minister, very important part of the world. And I think we’ve done very well,” Trump added.
When asked in an interview with CNBC Now about the call, Netanyahu refused to provide details.
“Well, I’m not going to get into details of our conversations. We’ve had thousands of — well, a lot, a lot of them — and if you think this is a crisis, you should be in some other conversations, but we’ve always found a way. We have so many agreements. We agree on the main things,” Netanyahu said, noting, as an example, their agreement that Iran’s nuclear program must be finished.
“Sometimes we have, as in the best of families, you have these tactical disagreements where you always find a way to work them out, and we do so as great friends,” he went on to add. “We can disagree in the morning, and by the afternoon we have common action.”
After the call with Netanyahu and another call with Hezbollah, Trump announced a ceasefire between the two sides and that talks between the United States and Iran would continue.