On the morning of Election Day, with polls open and the war in Iran dragging his party toward a historic beating, Donald Trump phoned into Fox & Friends with a surprise. The United States, he said, would stop sending roughly $4 billion a year in military aid to Israel at the end of 2026, under a deal he claimed he and Benjamin Netanyahu had struck months ago. For a base that spent the past year watching its “America First” president drag the country into another Middle East war, it sounded like a long-overdue win.
It wasn’t, and the man who did more than anyone in Congress to force this issue into the open said so within hours. Rep. Thomas Massie called it “pennies on the dollar” and “a desperate Election Day lie,” warning that the same taxpayer money would simply flow through as military coordination instead of as a separate line item in the appropriations bills. He’s right, the paper trail proves it, and it fosters less transparency, not more.
Start with the motive, because Trump practically confessed it on air. He complained that Israel aid had become “a bad talking point” and asked why Republicans should “suffer the slings from lunatics” over money Israel doesn’t “need.” That is a campaign problem being managed, not a foreign policy being changed, and Bloomberg reported he pitched it explicitly as a way to blunt election-year attacks.
It also came with no plan. Trump never explained how the money would actually stop, even though the memorandum guaranteeing Israel $3.8 billion a year runs until September 2028 and Congress wrote those levels into the 2021 defense bill. A president doesn’t undo a statute on a morning show, and the deal he says was made months ago reportedly blindsided Israeli security and financial officials, who noted next year’s budget was already drafted around the existing agreement.
Meanwhile, Israel has been angling for more, not less. Axios reported a year ago that Israel was seeking an unprecedented 20-year security agreement likely worth at least $4 billion a year, repackaged with “America First” provisions to win over Trump’s base. Nobody negotiating a two-decade package is preparing to walk away from the money, which raises the obvious question of where it’s going instead.
The answer is the Pentagon. The Congressional Research Service, hardly a hotbed of antiwar agitation, laid out the mechanism months ago: replace grant aid with joint programs funded from defense accounts, and shift congressional oversight away from the foreign affairs committees toward the defense ones. The Quincy Institute was blunter, calling it not a reduction in support but a reorganization that moves billions out of State Department grants and into general Pentagon procurement.
That reorganization is already moving through Congress. The House-passed defense bill authorizes $750 million for U.S.-Israel cooperative programs and extends the weapons stockpile authority for Israel, and the source for that is AIPAC’s own press release celebrating it. The same bill creates a new U.S.-Israel defense technology initiative that critics warn would be harder for future Congresses to unwind and would shift the relationship away from highly visible aid votes. Lawmakers and military experts told The Intercept it was highly irregular, a near-copy of an AIPAC-backed bill that had already died.
