Former U.S. president Donald Trump divided the Jewish community and American Jews from Israel  “just like he divided his political party, he divided his White House staff and he divided even his own family,” says Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for the New York Times on the latest episode of Haaretz Weekly. 

Sowing discord was no “unfortunate consequence” of Trump’s behavior: it was consistently his strategy, Baker told host Allison Kaplan Sommer in a wide-ranging interview on his new book  “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021” co-authored with his wife Susan Glasser, a staff writer at the New Yorker (and previous Haaretz Weekly guest). 

Baker offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at Trump’s Israel policies, his falling out with former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the ‘deal of the century’ and how those tensions inadvertently led to his greatest foreign policy achievement: the Abraham Accords. He also makes a prediction that if Trump were to win another term as president in 2024, his policy on Israel  would look “very different” than what he did previously.

In the interview, Baker also shares juicy anecdotes about the time King Abdullah of Jordan “nearly had a heart attack” when Trump told him on the phone that he was “gonna give him the West Bank” and when President Vladimir Putin got so tired of Trump’s bragging about places being named for him that Putin said, “maybe they should just name all of Israel after you, Donald.” 

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