Trump shares anti-Netanyahu critique on Truth Social

President-elect Donald J. Trump re-shared a video showcasing heavy-handed criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu by American professor Jeffrey Sachs on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Wednesday.

Intriguingly, Trump had hosted Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sarah at his residence in Mar-a-Lago in Florida back in July 2024. The two leaders were witnessed exchanging pleasantries.

Who is Jeffrey Sachs and what did he say?

Jeffrey Sachs, 70, is an American economist, educator and public commentator. Having completed his PhD at Harvard University, he’s had an illustrious career as an advisor to several governments and the U.N. Secretary-General, at think tanks and academia.

Sachs has gone viral for lambasting American foreign policy, which he claims is built on lies and deceit, no longer operating as a democracy. He is also an outspoken critic of lobbies and interest groups infiltrating American politics.

In the video shared by Trump, Sachs states:

The war in Syria, and you may actually hear from grown-up reporters who are lying through their teeth or ignorant beyond imagining, ‘That, oh, the war in Syria, yes, Russia intervened in Syria.’ Well, do you know that Obama tasks the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government starting four years before Russia intervened?

What kind of nonsense is that, and how many times did the New York Times report on Operation Timber Sycamore? Which was the presidential order to the CIA to overthrow Bashar al-Assad? Three times in 10 years.

This is not democracy; this is a game, and it is a name of narrative. Why did the U.S. invade Iraq in 2003? First of all, it was completely phony pretense. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, we were so wrong they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction.’ They actually did focus groups in the fall of 2002 to find out what would sell that war to the American people. Abe (Abram) Shulsky if you want to know the name of the PR genius.

They did focus groups on the war. They wanted the war all the time. They had to figure out how to sell the war to the American people. How to scare the sh*t out of the American people. It was a phony war. Where did that war come from? You know what it’s quite surprising; that war came from Netanyahu, actually.

You know that it’s weird and the way it is is that Netanyahu had from 1995 onward the theory that the only way we’re going to get rid of Hamas and Hezbollah is by toppling the governments that support them. That’s Iraq, Syria and Iran. And the guy is nothing if not obsessive and he’s still trying to get us to fight Iran this day, this week. He’s a deep dark son of a b*tch, sorry to tell you.

He has gotten us into endless wars and because of the power of all of this in U.S. politics. He’s gotten his way, but that war is totally phony. So what is this democracy versus dictatorship? Come on, these are not even sensible terms.

Jeffrey Sachs, PhD