A follow up to last night’s post on Mike Huckabee, now U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Axios reports that Donald Trump is pretty conspicuously declining to endorse Benjamin Netanyahu for Israel’s October election. I would be remiss I didn’t explicitly note that it is unprecedented and outrageous that a U.S. president is even considering a formal endorsement in the election of an allied country. They’ve often had preferences of course. But we used to have respect for the internal affairs of foreign governments, especially allied ones. In any case, we don’t now. And here we are.

This appears to be part of Trump’s deliberate move away from Israel and the closely related annoyance that Israel continues to complicate his other priorities, which are one part conventional geopolitics and one part corrupt deals with various Gulf States. But there’s another factor Axios points to which we’re familiar with from the U.S. endorsement game. Netanyahu’s polls look bad. And Trump doesn’t want to back a loser.

Here’s something to keep a close eye on. Mike Huckabee, who as part of Trump’s fun house diplomacy is now the U.S. ambassador to Israel, went on X yesterday and called the siege of a Palestinian family’s West Bank home by a group of Israeli settlers a “horrific act of terror.”

Now what’s happening there is that and worse. In many ways, what’s been happening in the West Bank for the last year and a half is worse than what is happening in Gaza, though the death toll is orders of magnitude less. But this doesn’t sound like Huckabee. He’s one of the biggest supporters of the settler movement and the most violent and nationalistic parts of it.

So what’s up here?