The Only Election Trump Cares About
Netanyahu future is a terrifying preview of Trump’s own and it’s keeping him up at night.
Donald Trump seems remarkably uninterested in November’s midterms. Some people have looked at his behavior and suggested dementia. I don’t buy it. I think Trump is paying very close attention to an election. Just not ours.
That election is in Israel, and it happens tomorrow. Israelis will decide whether Benjamin Netanyahu keeps his job. And Trump has made Netanyahu’s survival his personal business.
In March, days after the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, Trump called Axios to demand that Israeli President Isaac Herzog pardon Netanyahu “today.” “Every day I talk to Bibi about the war,” Trump said. “I want him to focus on the war and not on the f*cking court case.” He called Herzog “a disgrace,” claimed Herzog had promised him five times to grant the pardon, and said he wouldn’t meet with him until he did. Herzog’s office says no such promise was ever made.
Trump has been demanding a pardon for Netanyahu since June 2025. He asked for one from the floor of the Knesset that October and put it in a letter to Herzog in November. In February, he said Herzog should “be ashamed of himself.”
Trump and Netanyahu have more in common than their friendship. Each has faced criminal prosecution while pursuing power. Trump has already been convicted of 34 felonies in New York. Netanyahu is still fighting bribery, fraud and breach-of-trust charges at home and an International Criminal Court warrant over alleged war crimes in Gaza abroad. Neither has been shy about attacking the prosecutors, judges and journalists who have challenged him. Both are fond of the phrase “fake news.” And both have found willing allies among religious conservatives and the far right.
Netanyahu has spent the past four years fighting on two fronts: keeping his coalition together and keeping the courts from ending his political career.
Within days of returning to power in late 2022, his government rolled out a plan to give the coalition more control over the committee that picks judges, let the Knesset re-pass laws the Supreme Court had struck down, and let the coalition choose the court’s president. Netanyahu called it a correction to decades of judicial overreach. One 2023 bill appeared designed to keep him from being forced out of office over his trial. Israelis filled the streets every week in the largest protests in the country’s history. When his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, asked for a pause, Netanyahu fired him. In July 2023, the coalition stripped the courts of the power to block government decisions as “unreasonable.” The Supreme Court struck that law down 8–7 in January 2024, the first time it had ever voided an amendment to a Basic Law. Netanyahu kept going. In March 2025, the Knesset gave politicians more control over judicial appointments, effective after tomorrow’s election. This summer, Likud said for the first time that a Supreme Court ruling could be disregarded.
Then there’s the war. In April 2024, Netanyahu was reportedly ready to back a truce in Gaza. His finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, threatened to bring down the government. Netanyahu backed away. His government survived.
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In March 2025, Netanyahu broke a two-month-old ceasefire with Hamas. Within hours, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who had quit the coalition over that ceasefire, brought his party back. Netanyahu needed those votes to pass a budget by March 31 or face early elections. The ceasefire was over. Ben-Gvir was back. And Netanyahu got his budget.
And then there’s the trial. This year, as his corruption case reached its most damaging phase, Israel went to war with Iran, and his lawyers asked to postpone his testimony, citing security. He has been asking for delays since 2020, citing Gaza, then Lebanon, then Iran.
The dates don’t prove Netanyahu prolonged a war to save his job. But they raise a question he has never satisfactorily answered: how often did the survival of his government determine whether the fighting continued?
There is also October 7. On September 8, Haaretz reported that the president of the United Arab Emirates warned Netanyahu about 10 days before the attack that Hamas was planning a major operation. Netanyahu’s office called the report “an absolute lie.” Gadi Eisenkot, the former army chief now leading him in the polls, says Netanyahu received dozens of warnings and ignored them all. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett says he knows “for a fact” the warning was given. Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats, calls it deliberate abandonment.
Netanyahu has never had this much riding on an election. The International Criminal Court warrant issued in November 2024 for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza does not expire, and the crimes it covers carry no statute of limitations. For now, his office protects him. When governments like France have balked at arresting him, they have leaned on the argument that the sitting leader of a country outside the court enjoys immunity. That shield disappears the day he leaves office. After that, he is a private citizen wanted by an international court, and the 125 countries that belong to it, including most of Europe, Canada, Britain and Australia, are bound by treaty to arrest him if he sets foot on their soil. Israel isn’t a member, so he could stay home. But home is where the corruption trial is. Israel is increasingly isolated abroad, sanctions are growing, and the call-up of reservists has cost Netanyahu support at home. Defeat could leave him choosing between a courtroom in Jerusalem and a country he can never leave.
Netanyahu is Trump’s ghost of the future. Trump has spent more than a year demanding that Israel’s president pardon Netanyahu. He has publicly insulted Herzog, pressured him and tried to interfere in another country’s criminal proceedings. Why? Because for both men, the office has been the shield. Trump’s federal cases vanished when he returned to the White House. But his term ends in January 2029, and he can’t run again. When it does, he will be an 82-year-old former president with a felony conviction, a long list of enemies at home and abroad, and no office to stand behind. Tomorrow, Israeli voters may show him exactly what that looks like.
Both men share a history of self-enrichment and corruption. For all intents and purposes, both have gotten away with it. Tomorrow, that could change.
The world is not going to forget that Netanyahu has killed scores of innocent men, women and children. Nor is it going to tolerate the settlers’ crimes. Netanyahu’s havoc has been felt around the world, and his co-conspirator, Donald Trump, knows it. He and his henchman, Pete Hegseth, have committed atrocities of their own. They invaded a sovereign country and plucked Venezuela’s president out of his bed. They stole another country’s oil. They murdered fishermen they claimed, without proof, were drug traffickers. ICE has killed American citizens and mistreated foreigners within our own borders. All of them are crimes indictable by the ICC. And this is not an exhaustive list.
That is the election he is watching and why.
©2026 All Rights Reserved | The Powell House Press | Josh@thepowellhousepress.com
Originally published at https://www.thepowellhousepress.com on October 26, 2026.
