Vance, Trump and the midterms: Is US support for Israel ending?

The Democrats’ sweep of the House and Senate was dramatic, but on this week’s episode of The Deep Dive, host Jacob Laznik and political correspondent Shir Perets argue that the most alarming signal for Israel came from inside the Republican Party. 

Hours after the results, Vice President JD Vance listed four strategies for winning back voters who abandoned the GOP: end the war in Iran, focus on the cost of living and inflation, put America first, and “change our relationship to Israel.” That came on top of President Trump’s surprise announcement that US aid to Israel will end at the close of 2026, years before the current MOU expires.

Laznik says the move caught Jerusalem completely off guard. Is the panic over newly elected anti-Israel Democrats aimed at the wrong target? As Laznik puts it, the warning is “coming from inside the house.”

The conversation pushes past the doom-scrolling headlines. Perets cautions against fear-mongering. Fewer than 10% of incoming lawmakers are outspoken opponents of Israel, she notes, and Trump has promised to be “Mister Veto.” She also offers a memorable gift-card analogy for why the $4 billion in aid largely flows back to American defense firms anyway.

The pair are just as candid about what worries them. They discuss rhetoric that would have ended political careers before 2016, and a Democratic climate in which even a progressive like Scott Wiener faced angry protesters for being too slow to call the Gaza war a genocide. And in one of the episode’s sharpest observations, Perets says Israel didn’t put its eggs in the Republican basket. Netanyahu, she says, “hinged himself like a barnacle” to Trump.

The most urgent part of the episode is about the war with Iran. With the new Knesset sworn in on November 10 and a Democratic Congress arriving in January, Laznik and Perets map out how little time Netanyahu and Trump have left to act unilaterally. They explain why another round of fighting, if it comes, is likely to come soon, and they look at what an off-ramp could look like for a president who badly wants to be the man who ended Iran.

Their unexpected conclusion is that a change of the guard in both Washington and Jerusalem might reset the relationship rather than end it.