'When Trump said: F**k Bibi, it wasn't a slip of the tongue'

When journalist Barak Ravid’s book "Trump's Peace: the Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East" was published in Hebrew in 2021, two words in his text made international headlines.

Bitter about the Israeli Prime Minister’s eagerness to congratulate President Joe Biden on his win, Trump said of Benjamin Netanyahu in their 90-minute interview for the book: "Fuck him," making a point of declaring "I haven’t spoken to him since."

In a conversation with Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer, Ravid reports that two full years later, Trump and Netanyahu still haven’t exchanged a word.

On the occasion of the publication of his book in English - with new chapters updating the state of the Abraham Accords under the Biden administration, Ravid offers a look behind the scenes of his two lengthy interviews with Trump and how eager he was to express his unhappiness with Netanyahu’s behavior.

When Trump used the F-word, "It was at the end of a 20-minute monologue about all the bad things he thought about Netanyahu," Ravid shared, saying the interview revealed to him that the Trump-Netanyahu bromance "was like watching a show for four years. And then you realize that everything you saw was just BS, because the reality between those two was completely different."

Also on this week’s podcast, Haaretz English Editor in Chief Esther Solomon and correspondent Simon Waldman in Istanbul assess the political situation in Turkey after the election results leading to a second-round face-off for the presidency between incumbent Tayyip Erdogan and opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu. According to Waldman, the first round outcome is “the worst-case scenario” for the opposition.

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