Israel war: DeSantis slams Trump for saying Hezbollah is ‘very smart’

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) took a swing at former President Donald Trump‘s comments that appeared to praise Hezbollah and criticize Israel.

At a West Palm Beach rally Wednesday, Trump criticized the Israeli government for the intelligence failure surrounding Hamas’s Saturday attack. The former president said Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shia Islamist party the United States recognizes as a terrorist organization, was “very smart.”

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“Terrorists have murdered at least 1,200 Israelis and 22 Americans and are holding more hostage, so it is absurd that anyone, much less someone running for President, would choose now to attack our friend and ally, Israel, much less praise Hezbollah terrorists as ‘very smart,’” DeSantis wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “As President, I will stand with Israel and treat terrorists like the scum that they are.”

In the remarks DeSantis took issue with, Trump criticized Biden administration security officials for saying they were worried about a Hezbollah attack from the north. The former president said this was a bad move, as he warned Hezbollah was clever enough to see this as an admission of weakness at the border with Lebanon.

“I read all of Biden security people, can you imagine, National Defense people? And they said, ‘Gee, I hope Hezbollah doesn’t attack from the north because that’s the most vulnerable spot.’ I said, wait a minute, you know, Hezbollah’s very smart, they’re all very smart. … And they have a national defense minister or somebody saying, ‘I hope Hezbollah doesn’t attack us from the north.’ So the following morning, they attacked. They might not have been doing it, but if you listen to this jerk, you would attack from the north because he said.”

Trump also acknowledged that he would take heat for describing Hezbollah as “smart,” comparing it to the media coverage of his describing Chinese President Xi Jinping as “smart.”

“The press doesn’t like when they say, you know … I said that President Xi of China, 1.4 billion people, he controls it with an iron fist,” Trump said. “I said, ‘He’s a very smart man.’ They killed me the next day. ‘I said he was smart!’ What am I gonna say?”

The remarks were interpreted by DeSantis as a praise of Hezbollah by Trump. The Florida governor also took issue with Trump’s criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his saying that Israel needs to further strengthen itself.

“I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. That was a very terrible thing,” Trump said, referring to the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. He later said that Netanyahu tried to take credit for it, which “didn’t make me feel too good, but that’s alright.”

Trump lamented the attacks against Israel beginning on Saturday and urged Israel to prepare for a larger fight.

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“When I see sometimes the intelligence … you talked about some of the things that went wrong over the last week,” he said. “They’ve got to straighten it out because they’re fighting, potentially a very big force. They’re fighting potentially Iran. And when they have people saying the wrong things, everything they say is being digested by these people because they’re vicious and they’re smart. And boy, are they vicious because nobody’s ever seen the kind of site that we’ve seen. Nobody’s ever seen it.”

DeSantis has heavily criticized the Biden administration over its handling of the war in Israel and Gaza, arguing that its policies helped contribute to the crisis. His comments bashing Trump are the first time he has gone after the Republican front-runner for his stance on the conflict.