‘We Won’t Be Paying Israel Anymore’: Trump Says the $4 Billion a Year Ends in December

For years, America First has asked one question about the money: why is the American taxpayer sending roughly $4 billion a year to Israel? On Tuesday, the President of the United States said it is ending.

“As far as paying Israel, Bibi Netanyahu and I have made a deal that we give Israel $4 billion a year, and we made a deal months ago that we’re stopping,” President Donald Trump said in a phone interview with Fox & Friends on the morning of the midterm elections. “We won’t be paying Israel anymore,” he said, adding that the two sides had agreed that “by the end of this year we won’t be paying Israel.”

Trump said Israel no longer needs it. The Israeli government was “fine with it because, you know, they have become a very successful country,” he said, and “they don’t need” the money. Israel will still be able to buy American weapons, and “we’ll help Israel if they need it,” he added.

According to Trump, it was Netanyahu’s idea. “Can I be honest with you? He brought it up,” Trump said. “He said: ‘I think it would be appropriate if we do not receive aid,’ because he understands that this is one of their points of contention.” Netanyahu’s office declined to comment, and Israel has not independently confirmed the timetable. In January, Netanyahu said he hoped to “taper off” American military aid over the next decade, not by the end of this year.

Trump also made the politics plain. “The left uses the $4 billion payment that everybody knows about, when it’s no secret, as a signal of unfairness, and we can’t allow that to happen,” he said. “It’s almost too easy a target.” He named Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, who has forcefully criticized Israel on the campaign trail and drew a defense from Tucker Carlson: “Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don’t need it?”

The $4 billion figure is Trump rounding up the 2016 memorandum of understanding signed under President Barack Obama: $38 billion over ten years, or $3.8 billion annually — $3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing grants and $500 million for joint missile defense. That deal runs through 2028. And the memorandum is only the floor. In the two years after Oct. 7, 2023, the U.S. spent at least $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel, according to a Brown University Costs of War paper by the Quincy Institute’s William Hartung.

Whether the money actually stops is another question. The memorandum is not a treaty, but annual aid is set by Congress, and lawmakers have already appropriated funding through September 2027, according to i24NEWS. The president cannot simply repeal appropriations on his own. Trump did not say whether he meant the whole package, including missile defense, and when the Fox & Friends hosts pressed him on whether he meant military aid, cash assistance or weapons deliveries, he gave no further detail, the Jerusalem Post reported. The BBC said it had asked the White House to clarify.

In Israel, the backlash came fast, and it landed on Netanyahu. Former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot said the fact that Israel’s defense establishment learned of the shift through the media showed “just how much Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct poses a real danger.” Yair Golan, head of the left-wing Democrats party, called it “a severe blow to Israel’s security and the quality of life in the country.”

For American taxpayers, the headline is simple: a sitting Republican president has said, on the record, that Israel does not need their money. What Congress does with that next is the fight to watch in January.