One under-appreciated thing about Donald Trump is that he knows how to help a friend. Rarely in the annals of modern democracy has a US president done so much to assist a foreign leader to be re-elected. It is even harder to find an instance where it has made the difference between defeat and victory. Benjamin Netanyahu almost certainly owes his re-election to Mr Trump. Just 24 hours before Israelis went to the polls on Tuesday, Mr Trump declared Iran’s revolutionary guards to be a terrorist organisation. In the previous weeks, he recognised Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights and defied convention not to meddle in elections by sending his secretary of state on a supportive trip to Israel ahead of the poll. That is on top of Mr Trump’s shift last year of the US embassy to Jerusalem.
There used to be a saying in the US that politics stops at the water’s edge. That meant that Democrats would not criticise Republican presidents when overseas — and vice versa. It also meant that US presidents stuck to the rule of non-interference in allied democracies. Examples of that being breached — Barack Obama’s attempt to boost David Cameron just before the Brexit referendum in 2016, or George HW Bush’s threat to cut US aid to Israel before its 1991 election — were exceptions that proved the rule. Neither worked. This time, as is often the case with Mr Trump, was different. Another day in Mr Trump’s presidency. Another rule book incinerated. “You bought us a victory that was unimaginable, almost beyond comprehension,” Mr Netanyahu told his voters. He might as well have addressed his remarks to the White House.
Mr Netanyahu’s Israel is not the only example. The speed with which Mr Trump is nudging the democratic world in his direction is not fully understood. A year ago, Mr Trump was so isolated at the G7 summit in Canada that it was dubbed the G6 plus one. The body, which is the nearest thing western democracies have to a global steering committee, rebutted Mr Trump’s attempts to readmit Russia, which was ejected in 2014 after Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea. The US president’s loneliness was encapsulated by a picture that showed Germany’s Angela Merkel flanked by fellow leaders leaning sternly over a seated Mr Trump. We in the media may have to find a new moniker to describe the next G7 meeting in Biarritz in August. The G7 minus three?