Throwback Thursday: Netanyahu Played Trump

September 19, 2019

Good morning, News Viewers, we’re putting Coffee Talk on the backburner this morning and firing up Throwback Thursdays. And I found one rather relevant to today’s news.

Today’s entry comes from a News Views article from September 19, 2019, and I hope you enjoy looking back through a piece of our website’s history.

Tillerson: Netanyahu ‘played Trump’ with misinformation

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said during a Tuesday interview with a panel of Harvard professors that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “played” President Trump numerous times, according to the Harvard Gazette.

Tillerson said Netanyahu was “a bit Machiavellian” and cultivated relationships with world leaders he anticipated would be useful later.

Tillerson added that Israeli officials would use misinformation if they believed it was necessary to win U.S. officials over to their side of an issue.

“They did that with the president on a couple of occasions, to persuade him that ‘We’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys.’ We later exposed it to the president so he understood, ‘You’ve been played,’” Tillerson said. “It bothers me that an ally that’s that close and important to us would do that to us.”

From the article’s source, The Hill:

Tillerson left office in March 2018 and has made mild criticisms of Trump since then, prompting the president to call him “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell” in December 2018.

Jumping forward to today:

Who will be Trump' running mate?