Analysis: 'Israel is in charge'-- Netanyahu made sure Trump's Iran diplomacy was no picnic

WASHINGTON — As Donald Trump hobnobbed with lawmakers at the White House congressional picnic Thursday evening, Israel’s military was striking targets inside Iran just hours after the U.S. president had signaled that he preferred giving diplomatic talks another chance.

The scenes on the South Lawn, and then back inside the West Wing, offered a juxtaposition unique to the presidency. Outside, a small Navy band in all-white uniforms swayed onstage as they played an extended cut of the Commodores’ hit song “Brick House.” Inside, Trump quickly convened a high-level meeting of his national security war council to gather more information about Israel’s attack on its biggest regional rival.

U.S. presidents often have to live in two worlds, something Trump was reminded of Thursday night as he mingled with lawmakers and guests with his domestic policy bill hanging in the balance — only to be confronted with an action by one of America’s closest allies that risks setting the volatile Middle East ablaze with a wider conflict.

Outside the White House, Republican lawmakers were still maneuvering buffet lines under large white tents. As Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert patiently queued up, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who was uninvited until he wasn’t over his opposition to certain parts of Trump’s top domestic legislation, posed for a picture donning shades. South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace posed for a picture with the White House’s South Portico as a backdrop.

Inside the West Wing, Trump and his team were scrapping a planned Friday morning Cabinet meeting that would have included the usual reporters and television cameras — replaced by a closed-door huddle with his national security team in the top-secret White House Situation Room.

One moment, Rep. Michael R. Turner was jockeying for a spot on a rope line set up at the edge of the South Lawn driveway. The Ohio Republican’s efforts paid off. He smiled as he showed a companion the selfie he had just secured with the president. Moments later, a few White House aides scurried around the West Wing as the handful of journalists who had composed the day’s press pool searched for a White House official to answer their questions about the Israeli strikes.

After all, Trump had signaled during an impromptu news conference in the East Room earlier Thursday following a bill signing ceremony that he wanted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hold off on any attacks. Trump ran during the 2024 presidential campaign, in part, on bringing an end to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, with his aides not chasing reporters off the notion that their boss would welcome a Nobel Peace Prize for bringing peace to both fronts.

Trump was asked around midday Thursday how confident he was that a conflict with Iran could be averted.

“Well, I’d love to avoid the conflict,” he said. “Iran’s going to have to negotiate a little bit tougher, meaning they’re going to have to give us some things that they’re not willing to give us right now. I’m the last person. I’ve kept us out of wars.”

He then was asked how imminent he understood an Israeli strike on the Islamic Republic might be.

“I don’t want to say imminent, but it looks like something that could very well happen,” he said. “Look, it’s very simple, not complicated. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”

Speaking before the strikes, Trump then went on to describe a fairly normal U.S.-Iran relationship that hours later seemed improbable, if not impossible: “Other than that, I want them to be successful. … We’ll help them be successful. We’ll trade with them, we’ll do whatever is necessary.”

That vision now seems a fever dream, with Israel contending its strikes killed a number of top Iranian military leaders and Tehran pulling out of talks with the Trump administration about its nuclear program. The next round had been scheduled for Sunday.

In one of the earlier news conference’s most-telling moments, Trump told reporters that Israeli officials hadn’t told him “anything” about a coming Iran attack, adding: “Hopefully that doesn’t happen.”

But it did.

‘Destroy diplomacy’

The attack’s aftermath left the American commander in chief appearing to lack influence over another world leader, a charge Trump and congressional Republicans often lobbed toward former President Joe Biden.

Congressional Democrats and former Biden administration officials have contended that Trump’s pro-diplomacy posturing followed by Israel’s military strikes had made the president look weak — and that Netanyahu had played him.

“Israel’s attack on Iran, clearly intended to scuttle the Trump Administration’s negotiations with Tehran, is further evidence of how little respect world powers — including our own allies — have for President Trump,” Senate Foreign Relations member Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., wrote on social media Thursday night.

Murphy followed up in a Friday morning post: “Netanyahu wasn’t trying to help diplomacy; he was trying to destroy diplomacy. How do we know? They reportedly targeted and killed Iran’s chief negotiator with Trump.”

Wendy Sherman, deputy secretary of State under Biden, said Friday that the U.S. has a “very weak strongman for president.”

“He hasn’t resolved Ukraine. He hasn’t resolved Iran. He hasn’t resolved Gaza. … He’s going to hold a [military] parade on Saturday, and I’m not quite sure what to celebrate here,” she told CNN. “Israel is in charge this morning, not Donald Trump.”

It was a stinging assessment after Trump started his second term by, at times, putting aside his “America First” instincts to intervene in global affairs — but with few signs of results or tangible progress.

Nevertheless, Trump on Friday persisted in his push for a nuclear pact with Tehran.

“I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to ‘just do it,’ but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. “I told them it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated, or were told, that the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come – And they know how to use it.”

Then came yet another pitch for a deal — that perhaps felt more rooted in desperation then diplomacy.

“Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen. They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse!” Trump wrote. “There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end. Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”

‘Rubicon … crossed’

But Sherman said it was unlikely that Iran would have much confidence in U.S. assurances, given their new security concerns.

“None of us know exactly what’s going to happen here. Iran is a resistance country — the revolution in 1979 … was built on the concept of really resisting and creating an Islamic state, as Iran is called, and I think that this will create great nationalism in Iran,” she told CNN. “President Trump has tried to reclaim his relationship with Israel … but clearly Israel didn’t care for the diplomacy that Donald Trump was engaged in. They didn’t see a positive outcome, and they decided to take whatever action they thought was necessary for the security of Israel.”

“I think Prime Minister Netanyahu saw this as an opportunity not only to degrade Iran,” she added, “but to bolster his own standing heading into next year’s [Israeli] election.”

Senate Armed Services ranking member Jack Reed, D-R.I., dubbed the strikes an “alarming decision” by Israeli officials and a “reckless escalation that risks igniting regional violence.”

Trump on Friday was calling reporters to make the case that a broader conflict could be avoided, resorting to the same deal-making approach that has so far been unable to deliver peace in his second term.

“They missed the opportunity to make a deal. Now, they may have another opportunity. We’ll see,” Trump told NBC News, referring to unnamed Iranian officials.

“They’re calling me to speak,” he said. “The same people we worked with the last time. … Many of them are dead now.”

But Sina Toossi, a senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy, said Trump’s dreams of a deal have likely been dashed.

“Trump has said he wants a deal and publicly warned Israel not to strike,” Toossi said Friday. “Whether that was a strategic ruse or genuine restraint is now irrelevant. The Rubicon has been crossed.”