Published: 7 October 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Newly revealed quotes from former US presidents shows Obama was concerned about the Israeli government while Trump subscribed to antisemitic caricatures.
Former US president Barack Obama credited ex-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu with fuelling the rise of Putinism, alongside other authoritarian leaders, before stepping down from office, newly published quotes reveal.
"What I worry about most is, there is a war right now of ideas, more than any hot war, and it is between Putinism — which, by the way, is subscribed to, at some level, by [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan or Netanyahu or [former Philippines President Rodrigo] Duterte and [former US president Donald] Trump — and a vision of a liberal market-based democracy that has all kinds of flaws and is subject to all kinds of legitimate criticism, but on the other hand is sort of responsible for most of the human progress we've seen over the last 50, 75 years," he told reporters in off-the-record comments first published by Bloomberg.
The Justice Department released the transcript of the off-record conversation, which took place between Obama and reporters three days before Trump assumed power, seemingly unintentionally after Bloomberg's Jason Leopold had requested documents about former secretary of state Rex Tillerson through the Freedom of Information Act.
Maggie Haberman’s hotly anticipated book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, includes a wealth of new details on the 45th president's view of American Jews that often deteriorated into stereotypes, antisemitism controversies and transactional support for Israel.
The book opens with an anecdote of the author speaking to Trump by phone in May 2016 after he was endorsed by the infamous David Duke. The former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard had alleged that opposition to Trump’s campaign had its roots among “Jewish extremists” and “Jewish supremacists.”
The future president, responding to Haberman’s request for comment, told her that he was “here with my two Jewish lawyers,” apparently referring to David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt, who would become Trump's ambassador to Israel and a key adviser on the country, respectively.
When a Jewish hospital honoured Trump as its person of the year, Trump told a reporter: “Most people think my family is Jewish because we own so many buildings in Brooklyn. But I guess you don’t have to be Jewish to win this award, because they told me a gentile won it one year.”
READ MORE
Obama charges Netanyahu as a world leader who fuelled 'Putinism', report reveals (Haaretz)
'Here with my two Jewish lawyers': New Trump book doesn't spare his antisemitic quips (Haaretz)
Photo: Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Obama (Reuters/ Haaretz)
