The Judeo-Accelerationist Presidency

From killing Iran’s top general to legitimizing West Bank annexation, Donald Trump has made U.S. power serve Israel.

Donald Trump’s presidency has been marked by a dramatic intensification of U.S. support for Israel that would make previous presidential administrations blush. This shift is so marked and forceful that it can be understood through the lens of Judeo-Accelerationism. Originating from accelerationist theory, which holds that intensifying a prevailing system’s logic can bring about transformative change, Judeo-Accelerationism describes the abandonment of incremental support for Israel in favor of rapid, sweeping policies that reshape the geopolitical landscape to Israel’s benefit.

While every American president since Harry Truman has maintained a baseline of pro-Israel policy, Trump has gone well beyond this norm. His approach shattered long-standing diplomatic taboos and pushed U.S.-Israel relations into an entirely new and more aggressive phase. Far from merely maintaining the status quo, Trump’s policies reflect a zealous commitment to radically advancing Israeli interests at an unprecedented pace, making even the most hawkish neoconservative administrations of the past appear cautious by comparison.

Trump’s Judeo-Accelerationist Agenda: From First to Second Term

Both of Trump’s presidential terms reflect this relentless pursuit of Israeli objectives. The clearest and most symbolic move came in 2018, when Trump officially moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This wasn’t just a symbolic gesture—it was the violation of a long-held international consensus. Although Congress had passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act in 1995, every president since then, including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, had deferred the move out of concern it would undermine peace negotiations. Trump not only executed the move but also timed the embassy’s opening for May 14, 2018, the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding. As Palestinians protested at the Gaza border, Israeli forces killed dozens of demonstrators.

In March 2019, Trump went further by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. This region has been occupied by Israel since 1967 and unilaterally annexed in 1981. No other country had ever formally accepted this annexation. The timing of Trump’s announcement—just two weeks before Israeli parliamentary elections—suggested it was a deliberate attempt to help Benjamin Netanyahu secure victory. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo justified the move by stating it acknowledged “the reality on the ground,” effectively endorsing Israeli territorial conquest through military force.

Where earlier administrations at least gave lip service to a two-state solution, Trump and his advisors openly abandoned the framework. Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law, declared in May 2019: “If you say ‘two-state,’ it means one thing to the Israelis, it means one thing to the Palestinians. We said, you know, let’s just not say it.” The Trump administration’s so-called peace plan would have confined Palestinians to disconnected territories resembling bantustans, while allowing Israel to annex roughly 30% of the West Bank. This represented the most pro-Israeli “peace” proposal ever advanced by an American administration, one that would have formalized permanent Israeli control over Palestinian territory.

Further entrenching Israel’s power, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared in November 2019 that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were “not inherently illegal,” overturning decades of U.S. policy that had treated settlements as violations of international law. The “Pompeo Doctrine” marked a radical departure from the positions of previous presidents, including ardent Israel supporters like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Trump’s Abraham Accords, heralded by many as a diplomatic success, in fact undermined the long-standing Arab Peace Initiative. By pressuring Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco, and Sudan to normalize relations with Israel without securing any concessions for Palestinians, Trump stripped away one of the last forms of regional leverage against Israel’s intransigence. For groups like Hamas, this shift represented a death knell for Palestinian statehood aspirations. The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel was in part a daring response to the erosion of regional support for their cause—a gambit designed to re-ignite global attention and leverage international outrage over Israel’s retaliation.

Maximum Pressure, Minimum Restraint: The Trump Doctrine Against Iran

Trump’s sustained hostility toward Iran, Israel’s foremost regional adversary, further illustrates his Judeo-Accelerationist trajectory. His opposition predates his 2016 campaign, going back at least to his 2011 book Time to Get Tough, in which he declared:

“America’s primary goal with Iran must be to destroy its nuclear ambitions. Let me put them as plainly as I know how: Iran’s nuclear program must be stopped–by any and all means necessary. Period. We cannot allow this radical regime to acquire a nuclear weapon that they will either use or hand off to terrorists.”

He repeatedly condemned the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA), calling it a “disaster” and “the worst deal ever.”

Though he occasionally struck a peaceful tone with select audiences, Trump’s actual policy toward Iran was one of consistent escalation. After pulling the United States out of the JCPOA in May 2018, he launched the “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign—an aggressive move that clashed with his public image as an antiwar candidate. He dismissed the deal as “the worst deal ever,” claiming it “enriched the Iranian regime and enabled its malign behavior, while at best delaying its ability to pursue nuclear weapons.” Sanctions were swiftly reinstated, hitting Iran’s energy, petrochemical, and financial sectors. Trump also warned of “severe consequences” for any country that continued doing business with Iran.

These measures ranked among the most severe sanctions in modern history, with the explicit aim to “bring Iran’s oil exports to zero, denying the regime its principal source of revenue.” Trump’s administration steadily widened the scope of the sanctions, targeting Iran’s central bank, space agency, and even the inner circle of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

In October 2019, Trump sanctioned Iran’s construction industry, linking it to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which he had previously designated as a foreign terrorist organization in April of that year—the first time the United States had ever applied that label to another country’s military.

At the time of the terrorist designation, Trump bragged: “If you are doing business with the IRGC, you will be bankrolling terrorism…This designation will be the first time that the United States has ever named a part of another government as an FTO [foreign terrorist organization].” These steps were not only economic in nature but also intended to isolate Iran diplomatically, cripple its economy, and prepare the ground for potential military confrontation.

The most dramatic episode came in January 2020, when Trump authorized the drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. Trump claimed Soleimani had been “plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel,” a move that brought the United States and Iran to the edge of open conflict. Iran retaliated with missile strikes on U.S. bases, and tensions surged as the world braced for war.

Even after this volatile episode, Trump continued to escalate with Iran. Toward the end of his first term, he reportedly explored military options for targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. According to accounts, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and other senior officials pushed back firmly. Milley warned, “If you do this, you’re gonna have a f***ing war,” and began holding daily briefings to prevent an unchecked spiral toward military conflict, a process he described as efforts to “land the plane.”

As tensions with both Iran and Israel intensified, Trump privately gave the green light for preparations to strike Iranian targets. U.S. military assets—including carrier strike groups, bombers, and fighter jets—were moved into strategic positions. According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump informed aides that he “approved of attack plans for Iran, but was holding off on giving the final order to see if Tehran will abandon its nuclear program.”

In June 2025, Trump ordered direct strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites—Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan—using B-2 stealth bombers and bunker-buster bombs. Trump declared that Iran’s nuclear capabilities were “completely and totally obliterated,” despite conflicting reports from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) suggesting that the strikes failed to neutralize Iran’s underground infrastructure and only briefly hindered its nuclear capabilities. Rafael Grossi, head of the UN nuclear watchdog, stated Iran could resume uranium enrichment “within a matter of months.”

This escalation went far beyond anything contemplated by previous neoconservative administrations. Even the Bush administration, which went on a nation-building bender in Iraq and Afghanistan, had never authorized such a strike on Iranian soil. Trump’s willingness to risk regional war to directly advance Israeli security interests represents a qualitatively different level of commitment to Zionist objectives that previous administrations would dare not broach.

Unprecedented Support from Israel First Interests

Trump’s policies cannot be divorced from the powerful influence of pro-Israel donors and organizations. According to watchdog group Track AIPAC, pro-Israel interests have contributed over $230 million to Trump since 2020. The vast majority—over $215 million—came from Miriam Adelson’s Preserve America PAC. Trump’s unwavering pro-Israel stance has helped win over former critics in the neoconservative camp, such as Bill Kristol, who endorsed Trump’s Iran strikes, stating, “You’ve got to go to war with the president you have.”

Within his administration, Trump has elevated individuals whose views reflect the most extreme elements of the Zionist project. David Friedman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Israel during Trump’s first term, was a financier of West Bank settlements and later published One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Mike Huckabee, Trump’s current ambassador to Israel and a vocal Christian Zionist, has floated ideas for population transfers of Palestinians while supporting continued Israeli annexation.

In January 2025, Trump proposed moving Gaza’s 2 million Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan: “I’d like Egypt to take people, and I’d like Jordan to take people … we just clean out that whole thing.” Asked if the relocation would be temporary, he responded that it could be “long term.” The following month, Trump stated during a press conference with Netanyahu that the United States would “take over” Gaza and transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Israeli analyst Noam Sheizaf observed: “Trump accomplished what no Israeli politician has: He transformed ‘population transfer’ from a fringe, near-taboo concept in Israeli political discourse to a viable policy option.”

Domestically, Trump further prioritized Jewish interests through his January 2025 Executive Order to “Combat Anti-Semitism.” This order allowed for the deportation of foreign students participating in pro-Palestinian activism and threatened universities with loss of funding if they failed to suppress such speech. The order marked an unprecedented use of federal power to silence political dissent in service of a foreign nation.

America Last: Trump’s Radical Realignment in Service of Israeli Power

What makes Trump’s presidency uniquely dangerous is not simply the extremity of individual policies, but their cumulative effect in normalizing Jewish supremacist objectives under U.S. protection. By shattering norms around Jerusalem, settlements, and Palestinian displacement, Trump has created new facts on the ground that future administrations may find politically impossible to reverse.

Unlike his predecessors, who operated within international frameworks, respected multilateral diplomacy, and maintained at least nominal distance from Israel’s most extreme demands, Trump has turned the United States into an uncritical enabler of Israeli expansionism. His decisions have gone far beyond even the Bush administration, which pursued nation-building campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan but never attacked Iran directly or endorsed population transfer.

Despite running as an America First candidate, Trump has spent much of his political capital bolstering Israeli military and geopolitical power. In the process, he has revealed the hollow nature of his anti-war image and nationalist rhetoric. His administration, staffed with ideologues committed to Israeli supremacy, has reoriented U.S. foreign policy around the goal of cementing Israel’s regional hegemony, no matter the cost in lives, stability, or American credibility.

By aligning U.S. power with Israel’s expansionist agenda, Trump has steered American foreign policy into dangerous and potentially irreversible territory.