On the day of the US midterm elections, Donald Trump announced that annual funding for Israel of about $4 billion would stop from the end of the year. Adevărul links the move to growing American dissatisfaction with support for Tel Aviv and to electoral pressure on Republicans, who risk losing the House of Representatives and the Senate as costs rise and backing for Israel falls amid what the paper calls the genocide in the Gaza Strip, the occupation of the West Bank and attacks on neighbours.
In an interview with Adevărul, foreign-policy analyst Cătălin Buciumeanu said the announcement can be read as an electoral measure. He argued that Trump is trying to answer a perception that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dictates decisions at the White House, and that Washington’s relationship with Israel could be fundamentally reassessed. The announcement was made on Fox and Friends in the early part of the US day.
Buciumeanu said Americans are paying more for diesel, petrol, food and other goods because agriculture cannot run without fuel, and he tied that to two decisions Trump took alone at the White House, unconnected in his view to the Republican Party or the MAGA base: a tariff war aimed both at friendly states and at states he wanted to pressure, and the war with Iran. Among MAGA members and sympathisers, he said, there is an unpleasant reading that Trump had no reason to enter that war.
He pointed to a 2025 security analysis by the intelligence community under Tulsi Gabbard and a Pentagon security analysis from the beginning of 2026. Neither, he said, treated Iran as a nuclear problem for the United States in the coming years, rather than in the next six months. Trump nevertheless attacked Iran last year and, after 30 days, declared triumphantly that its nuclear bases had been obliterated. Hostilities resumed at the beginning of March this year, with an attempt at regime change on the grounds that Iran was again far too close to developing nuclear weapons.
Buciumeanu said Trump’s electorate then asked whether Israel had a say in a step taken even though the Pentagon, the CIA and the intelligence community did not see Iran as an imminent danger. Supporters’ anger turned toward Netanyahu. Their conclusion, as he put it, was that either Netanyahu has something on Trump or Trump is far too easy to fool and cannot stand up to him. Either version, he said, is equally bad for Trump. He described the decision to cut all funding for the war Israel is waging against Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen as a response to the perception that Netanyahu tells Trump what to do.
Asked whether cutting that funding on election day is enough for an ordinary American to tip the balance decisively by the end of the day, Buciumeanu said it certainly is not. He said many people who have had a political awakening now see Trump as a pathological liar, and that there is a contradiction between what he says and what he does. A politician speaks from a political angle, he said, while the citizen lives with the consequences, and Americans are living with the consequences of rhetoric Trump still will not drop.
In the 2024 campaign, Buciumeanu recalled, Trump said plainly that if he had been president instead of George Bush or Obama, or in the period when the Vietnam war began, those wars would not have started, not merely ended on time. The campaign rested on merits he could not honour. He promised to end the war in Ukraine in the first week after reaching the White House, yet this is already the second year of his second term and the negotiations have not moved decisively. He has also started a new war in the Middle East that has raised prices around the world, not only for Americans.
Buciumeanu said the promise to make America great and beautiful again and to put America first appears to apply only to a limited group of businesspeople around Trump and to interests close to his administration. Some Republicans who voted for him in 2024 are slowly moving toward the Democrats, even in Republican states, which he said explains weaker polling and popularity of about 35–37%.
On whether Republicans could suddenly find they will lose Texas, Kansas and similar states they have dominated for at least the last 30 to 40 years, he said this is no longer something Republicans can repair. The question is whether such exceptions become a trend. He described the midterms as a referendum on Trump’s presidency, which is why many Republican candidates did not want to appear with him at any campaign rallies. If the trend continues, he said, Democrats will crush them in 2028.
He expected that, after Democrats probably win both the Senate and the House, at least two figures in the Trump administration would be suspended or have their authority blocked. He named Robert Kennedy Jr., whom he called a cartoon character who has wrecked the medical system, and Pete Hegseth, who he said has politicised the Pentagon and turned the US military into a joke. Both, he said, will be heard many times and pushed to resign. Investigations would also begin into Trump’s policies and into executive orders that conflicted with American values and way of life.
Asked whether that repeats the Democratic trap of 2018, when investigations and especially impeachment efforts let Trump cast himself as a victim, Buciumeanu said this is no longer about a third term. He also said there is much more concrete material on corruption around Trump and people brought to the White House for loyalty. He pointed to peace talks on Ukraine conducted by two special envoys, Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, both of whom he said are negotiating billion-dollar contracts with Russian oligarchs outside American economic diplomacy and the American system.
Beyond a goal that should have been peace in Ukraine, he said Vladimir Putin tried in talks with the two men to separate peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine from the economic file of restarting relations with the United States, and succeeded in putting that subject at his own discretion. Americans who lived through the Cold War, he said, cannot be told that Russia, as successor to the Soviet Union, has suddenly become acceptable to Washington and that doing business with it is honourable. Nobody in the United States believes that, however practical and opportunistic the story may look.
A poll last month, cited in the interview, found that 56% of Americans want financial aid to Israel at least limited, if not stopped entirely. Those who wanted it stopped altogether were 35%, against 21% who wanted only a reduction.
Buciumeanu said the issue also concerns Europeans, because the trend is not only about Israel but about American involvement in the whole world. Unemployment is rising in the United States, inflation is hard to bear, and food and fuel prices have risen. Americans are thinking they should deal with their own problems before global ones.
He called that a danger for Europe and especially for Romania, because some politicians in Romania still believe America will be present in a possible conflict. It will not, he said. America will offer at most information, perhaps satellite images, or declarative political support from an official platform, with calls to respect international relations and to uphold the West and its values.
Asked whether ordinary Americans would have reached this conclusion if Tel Aviv had not gone so far with the genocide in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank or the invasion of other neighbours, he said he would rather say no, and that support for Israel would probably have continued. Relations will now have to be restarted on other bases and other principles. Until now America assumed that responsibility toward Israel, but the time for an accounting has come. US domestic problems are larger and, from the American citizen’s point of view, more important than those in the Middle East. Electorate irritation has become quite intense lately, he said, also because of Israeli lobbying around the White House and Congress. He believes America will fundamentally reassess its attachment not only to Israel but to the Middle East and to the world in general.