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President Donald Trump spoke to Fox and Friends host Lawrence Jones on Tuesday morning, around 90 minutes after his extraordinary rant about the collapse of the short-lived ceasefire between Israel and Iran, to explain why he was more annoyed with the former than the latter.
Crossing the South Lawn of the White House as he set out to attend a NATO summit in The Netherlands, a furious Trump stopped to tell the press: “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, do you understand that?”
On Monday, the president had been showered with praise by relieved anti-war conservatives for getting both sides to commit to a cessation of hostilities following 12 days of back-and-forth missile strikes and just hours after Iran had blasted an American military base in Qatar in response to the U.S. bombing raids on its nuclear facilities on Saturday.
But on Tuesday, the ceasefire quickly fell apart as Israel and Iran accused each other of violating its terms, prompting the explosion of anger on Truth Social and in front of the TV cameras.
On Fox News’s flagship breakfast show, Jones told viewers: “I got the opportunity to just talk to [Trump] before we just went on air for the 8 o’clock hour and I said, ‘I haven’t seen you this upset in a while, what’s really going on?’
“He had just hung up with Bibi Netanyahu, the [Israeli] prime minister, and he said that the prime minister is bringing all the planes back.
“I said, ‘Why are you so frustrated with Israel?’ And he says, because he didn’t feel like it was good faith, that even though they still had some time until the ceasefire, that they essentially unloaded on Iran.”
Jones continued: “I said, ‘What about Iran?’ as it relates to some of the reports that they’re still doing the program? He says, ‘They got to save face for the country. They still got to appear to be strong.’”
“But he goes, ‘Their program is done.’ He said, ‘I probably fixed all of that when they hit their targets there.’ But he says ‘I’m not happy with both of them, but more so Israel,’ because he goes, ‘It’s over, it’s done, the program is done.’”
Over on MSNBC, Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Jonathan Lemire were more scandalized by the expletive from Trump, noting his “remarkable anger.”
“You can sort through the F word, but geopolitically, and I’m dead serious here, his message to Israel is really the great takeaway,” Scarborough said.
“Yeah, we got the full Trump experience just there,” Lemire agreed. “Full Trump. He is certainly more – his language is much more colorful in private than he usually allows in public. We got a little bit of it there too.
“But you’re right, it’s interesting covering Donald Trump for a long time even in his remarks to reporters there, though angry at Iran, very clearly far more so at Israel. And then doubling down on that with that Truth Social post. That’s the issue here.”
The anchor continued: “And we know that he and Benjamin Netanyahu used to be close allies, there was a real fraying of that in the previous months. We know that the president did not go to Israel when he went to the Middle East a month or so back.
“It did seem like he was working pretty well with Netanyahu in the last week or so during this campaign against Iran. But President Trump wants the war to stop. He didn’t want it to begin in the first place. He went along with it.
“He did help, certainly, with that strike at the facilities on Saturday. But now he’s eager for it to come to a quick conclusion. And he’s furious that, at least for now, it hasn’t just yet.”
