Trump blames ‘great dislike’ for Israel for election defeat and says ‘Israel would not exist except for Donald Trump’

US President Donald Trump has claimed that Israel owes its survival to him, saying the countries the United States protected during the war on Iran will repay its full cost, and admitting that “a great dislike, incredibly, for Israel” among American voters helped sink the Republicans in last week’s midterm elections.

Trump spoke to Ross Douthat on 60 Minutes, the CBS News current affairs programme, in an interview broadcast last night. It was his first major interview since Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress on 3 November.

Asked how the war on Iran would end, Trump said the US-protected countries “are going to pay us back any and all costs that we’ve had for the war. Because without us, they wouldn’t exist. Without us, Israel wouldn’t exist.”

טראמפ לתוכנית ’60 דקות’: לא רואה סיבה להסלים את המלחמה באיראן. ישראל תפצה אותנו על עלויות המלחמה, כי בלעדינו היא לא הייתה קיימת@nathanguttman pic.twitter.com/uUBJtCS9LF

— כאן חדשות (@kann_news) November 9, 2026

He went further. “Israel would not exist except for Donald Trump,” he said, pointing to the US strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025, when “we went in with those beautiful B2 bombers.” He added: “If I didn’t do that, there would be no Israel right now.”

Reports after those strikes found that the US bombs failed to destroy the Fordow nuclear facility. Douthat also pointed out that Iran still has nuclear material. Trump dismissed this, saying, “They have nothing. It’s buried under thousands of tons of rock.”

Trump said the Republicans lost because he was not on the ballot himself and because his supporters had been asked to back “candidates that they didn’t like.” But he said voters had other reasons too. “They didn’t like the war, they didn’t like the fact that gasoline went up, ’cause I had it down at a low,” he said. “And there’s a great dislike, incredibly, for Israel.”

Trump says there is an enormous dislike for Israel among the American public and he lost the election because his policy could not reflect that dislike pic.twitter.com/o9LJjvQu6s

— Bruno Maçães (@MacaesBruno) November 9, 2026

Trump’s comments follow a remarkable post-mortem by Vice President JD Vance. In a long post on X the day after the election, Vance wrote: “The reason we lost is the war.” He said many people who had voted for Trump and Vance in 2024 switched to the Democrats this year. He also cited polling which found that two of the top four things these voters wanted were to “end the war” and to “change our relationship to Israel.”

“If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it, then do so,” Vance wrote.

Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, has rejected attempts to blame Israel. “The decision to attack Iran was the decision of the United States. It wasn’t our decision,” he told the Israeli broadcaster i24NEWS, calling it “unfortunate” that people had linked rising oil prices to Israel.

American voters’ anger over Israel has become a major election issue. An internal Democratic Party review earlier this year found that backing Israel during the Gaza genocide cost the party the 2024 election.