Call it the presidential rant heard round the world.
On Monday, Axios reported that US President Donald Trump unloaded on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a phone call, telling him he was “f***ing crazy,” that “you’d be in prison if it weren’t for me,” and that Israeli actions in Lebanon were threatening his negotiations with Iran.
The Prime Minister’s Office quickly disputed the report. But two days later, when asked directly on a New York Post podcast whether he had called Netanyahu “effing crazy” and told him that he had helped keep him out of jail, Trump answered simply: “I did.”
That admission immediately fueled another round of speculation that relations between Trump and Netanyahu had reached a breaking point. The assumption behind much of the coverage was familiar: an angry Trump phone call must mean a crisis in US-Israel relations, that Netanyahu had lost Trump, and that the party was over.
History suggests otherwise.
Disagreements between Jerusalem and Washington are not unusual. Nor are disagreements between Trump and Netanyahu. What is striking is how often these episodes are portrayed as evidence of an impending rupture, only for the relationship to return to its previous equilibrium hours, days, or weeks later.
Netanyahu alluded to this reality in a CNBC interview after Trump confirmed the call.
Trump: We can have 'tactical disagreements'
“Sometimes we have, as in the best of families, tactical disagreements,” he said. “We always find a way to work them out, and we do so as great friends. We can disagree in the morning, and by the afternoon, we have common actions.”
Ordinarily, comments like that might be dismissed as boilerplate damage control. In this case, however, there is a substantial body of evidence supporting the thesis.
Three patterns emerge from this latest drama.
First, Trump periodically vents his frustrations at Netanyahu in very blunt and salty language.
Second, those outbursts are routinely interpreted as evidence of a strategic rupture.
And third, the relationship repeatedly proves more resilient than the headlines suggest.
Let's start with the first pattern.
This is hardly the first time Trump has exploded at Netanyahu. In fact, the closest parallel to this week’s incident took place just a year ago.
On June 24, 2025, the last day of the 12-Day War with Iran, after Trump announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, Tehran fired ballistic missiles at Israel. Netanyahu wanted to send an unmistakable message to Iran that Jerusalem would not tolerate any violation of the ceasefire, and dispatched fighter planes to bomb Tehran.
Trump, who brokered the ceasefire, was furious and called Netanyahu, ordering him to call off the attack. He then erupted before boarding Marine One.
“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*** they’re doing,” he said, stressing that he was “not happy with Israel.”
The reaction was as predictable as it was immediate. Headlines focused on Trump’s anger. Pundits warned of a serious breach with Netanyahu.
Yet shortly afterward, Trump spoke with the prime minister, the Trump-brokered ceasefire held, and the working relationship continued as though the outburst had never happened.
In retrospect, that episode looks less like the beginning of a rupture and more like a preview of what would happen again this week.
Nor was that outburst the first one.
Trump's earlier outbursts at Netanyahu
In December 2021, Barak Ravid, the same journalist who reported on Monday’s phone call, published excerpts from an interview with Trump conducted for a book on the Abraham Accords.
The then-former president was still furious over Netanyahu’s decision to congratulate Joe Biden after the 2020 election.
“The first person who congratulated him was Bibi Netanyahu,” Trump said. “The man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with.”
Then came the line that captured headlines around the world: “He was very early. Like earlier than most. I haven’t spoken to him since. F*** him.”
Those comments were widely interpreted as proof that the relationship forged during Trump’s first term had collapsed. And why wouldn’t they be?
Here was the president who moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, and brokered the Abraham Accords. If he was now cursing out Netanyahu in this manner, surely something fundamental in the relationship had changed.
That assumption was reinforced two years later when, just five days after October 7, Trump – while campaigning for president – revisited the 2020 assassination of Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani and accused Netanyahu of backing away from participation at the last minute.
“Israel was going to do this with us,” Trump said at a campaign rally. “The night before it happened, I got a call that Israel will not be participating in this attack.”
Then he added stinging criticism: “I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. We were disappointed by that. Very disappointed. But we did the job ourselves, with absolute precision... and then Bibi tried to take credit for it.”
Again, headlines proclaimed a breach. Again, commentators – and the prime minister’s political opponents – speculated that Trump had turned on Netanyahu, and that if Trump returned to the White House, relations with Israel would not be the same. Again, they were wrong.
When Trump returned to the White House, Netanyahu was the first foreign leader he invited to Washington. Since then, Netanyahu has spent more time with Trump than with any other foreign leader.
Which brings us to the second pattern.
There is a tendency, regardless of who occupies the White House, to magnify disagreements and conflate policy disputes with a crisis in the relationship itself.
More than a decade ago, during the often-tense Obama-Netanyahu years, similar warnings were commonplace.
One week, it concerned settlements. Next, it was Iran. Then came disputes over the peace process, diplomatic snubs, leaked insults, and public criticism delivered through the media.
Each episode generated a fresh round of predictions that US-Israel relations were entering unprecedented turmoil.
Yet the relationship endured.
The reason is simple: observers often confuse tensions between leaders with the broader relationship between countries. The former can be rocky. The latter is usually far more resilient.
Even at the height of the Obama-Netanyahu disagreements, security cooperation continued, intelligence ties remained close, military aid expanded, and support for Israel in Congress remained strong (something that has changed since).
As one “crisis” followed another, the word itself began to lose much of its meaning.
What was frequently described as a rupture was often something far more mundane: two allies with overlapping interests, but not identical ones, because they are separate countries, disagreeing over particular policy while continuing to cooperate on a wide array of matters of strategic importance.
The latest Trump-Netanyahu confrontation fits comfortably into that tradition.
Ironically, Trump’s latest rant comes at a moment when US-Israel strategic coordination is arguably closer than ever. The two countries recently fought side by side – literally – against a common enemy. The military and intelligence cooperation is unprecedented.
Yet it is precisely at this moment that every report of tension generates great anxiety in Israel, and the reason is easy to understand.
Israel’s standing among large segments of the American public has deteriorated dramatically since October 7. Public opinion trends are swiftly moving in the wrong direction. So if Netanyahu has somehow lost Trump, then what remains? If he has lost the president as well as much of the American public, Israel could find itself in a far more precarious diplomatic position.
That fear helps explain why every report of tension is immediately magnified. It is also an argument that will certainly be used against the prime minister in the upcoming election campaign.
And this brings us to the third pattern.
Trump’s outbursts often occur when he believes Netanyahu is jeopardizing a diplomatic achievement that the president views as his own.
The common denominator in the June 2025 ceasefire episode and this week’s Lebanon dispute is that in both cases, Trump believed Israeli military actions were threatening an initiative in which he was personally invested.
Last year, it was the Iran ceasefire. This week, efforts focused on stabilizing the situation in Lebanon while pursuing broader diplomatic objectives related to Iran.
All of this is not to imply that the disagreements are meaningless. Trump’s anger is real. The tensions are real. The differences are real.
But equally real is the fact that the Trump-Netanyahu relationship has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to absorb public spats, personal insults, and periods of apparent estrangement without fundamentally breaking down.
Indeed, in the very same New York Post interview in which Trump confirmed calling Netanyahu “crazy,” he also said this: “I have a very good relationship with him... I like Bibi a lot. And I’ve worked very well with him.”
Trump’s outbursts toward Netanyahu are not indicators of a lasting breach but rather snapshots of a particular moment.
The president vents, sometimes profanely, when he believes Israel is complicating a diplomatic initiative he values. Then, more often than not, he reaffirms the relationship and moves on to the next crisis.
The June 2025 ceasefire dispute – the last time Trump used the f-word in relation to Israel – followed that script. The latest presidential rant will likely do the same.