The president who moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, recognized the Golan Heights as Israeli, and took the country to war alongside Israel has now pronounced the pro-Israel lobby dead. In an interview broadcast Monday on the Real America’s Voice network, Donald Trump told host Wayne Allyn Root that the lobby that once dominated Washington is a relic of a different era.
Trump said the biggest change he had seen over the last 10 or 15 years was what had happened to Israel and the Jewish people, who 20 or 25 years ago had the strongest lobby in Washington.
That part of the statement is uncontroversial history. The next part was not. Asked about the shift in Congress, Trump said almost everyone, particularly large numbers of them, was no longer pro-Israel, and that the Democrats were in control of the House.
He then turned to the Senate’s Democratic minority leader, Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the country. Trump said Schumer had become almost like a Palestinian, that it was truly amazing, and that he had never seen anything like it before.
When Trump used the same comparison in 2025, Jewish and Muslim organizations took it as an insult, on the ground that “Palestinian” was being used as a slur. Nothing in this week’s version suggests he disagrees with the criticism; he repeated the line anyway, during a war in which Gaza has sat under Israeli occupation since the ceasefire of October 2025.
A claim that fits the moment
There is a reason a president at war with Iran would want to broadcast the lobby’s decline. The statement flatters his own independence: the man who did more for Israel than any of his predecessors now presents himself as free of the forces that used to push presidents toward Israel. It also hands him a political argument against the Democratic Party, whose base has moved sharply away from Israel while his own party remains largely loyal.
The polling gives the claim some support. An Associated Press-NORC survey published in July found that 58 percent of Democrats now say the United States is “too supportive” of the Israelis, up from 45 percent in January 2024. Roughly three in ten American adults believe Israel has too much influence over US policy. Support for Israel has eroded dramatically among Democrats, with signs of division among Republicans. Trump has said versions of this before: in September 2025 he told the Daily Caller that Congress no longer backed Israel as one body and that young Republicans were drifting away.
But the president’s telling is self-serving in a specific way. The decline he describes was not caused by him; it is a demographic and generational shift that has been measured for years, and that he has alternately ignored and weaponized. Nor is the lobby as finished as he claims. AIPAC and its allies still pour money into primaries, and most of the races they pour it into still go their way. What has changed is the return on that spending: in a Congress where the Democratic caucus is visibly split over Israel, money buys less unanimity than it did when the lobby was, by Trump’s own account, the strongest in Washington.
The Schumer line is the story
The remarkable part of the interview is not the polling analysis. It is the insult aimed at Schumer, delivered on a friendly program to an audience that will not object. Calling a Jewish senator “almost like a Palestinian” is a statement about the word itself: in Trump’s vocabulary, to be like a Palestinian is to have abandoned Israel. It is the language of a man measuring loyalty to Israel as a test of Americanness, and it will do what such language always does, which is to give cover to everyone who thinks the same thing but lacks the platform to say it.
There is also a cold political calculation underneath. Schumer has positioned himself as a critic of the Israeli government’s conduct in the war, and the war with Iran has made Israel the central issue of American politics. If Trump can define Schumer as the enemy of Israel, he defines every Democrat who questions Israeli policy as one too. The remark is not a slip. It is a campaign line delivered a year early.
None of this makes the underlying observation wrong. The pro-Israel lobby is weaker than it was a quarter century ago, the Democratic Party is divided, and the House majority belongs to the party whose voters are most skeptical of Israel. Trump is simply claiming credit for a change he did not produce, and using it to sharpen an attack on the opposition. The lobby’s decline is real. The president’s account of it is propaganda with numbers attached.
Sources: Al Jazeera, Jordan News, UA.NEWS, Associated Press