Trump said he’d become Israeli prime minister ‘if people ever get tired of me in the US’

As polls opened for the 2026 U.S. midterm elections, a claim (archived) circulated online that U.S. President Donald Trump said, “If people ever get tired of me in the U.S., I’ll move to Israel, become prime minister.”

X user @MarioNafwal shared the alleged quote and wrote, “Well, I think they’re already tired of you, Mr. President, but Israelis are tired of Bibi, too.”

The claim also circulated on Facebook (archived).

Social media users correctly attributed the quote to Trump, who said it during a phone interview with Fox News (time code 22:20) on Tuesday. 

According to a clip from Fox News’ coverage that the network posted online, Trump said the following while speaking about cutting U.S. financial aid to Israel (emphasis ours):

And let me tell you something, if they do need it, if for some reason they do need it or they need help — So, I’m the number one, I was so voted, I’m at 99% approval rating in Israel, can you believe it? In fact, if people ever get tired of me in the U.S., I’ll move to Israel, become prime minister. But I’m at 90 — think of it — I’m at 99%, I have the highest approval rating of anybody in history.

We contacted the White House to ask which approval polling Trump was referring to during his interview and await a reply.

Polling from the Jewish People Policy Institute, an Israel-based think tank that aims to shape strategy and policy on issues affecting Jewish people, published on Nov. 2 found that 73% of Israelis find Trump to be “a better-than-average U.S. president for Israel’s interests.” That polling also found that 54% of Jewish Israelis said Trump was “one of the best presidents in U.S. history in the Israeli context” and an additional 25% described him as “above average” on the same metric, according to the JPPI.

Election Day was not the first time Trump appeared to air thoughts of running for office in Israel. On May 20, Trump also claimed he had a 99% approval rating in Israel and could run for prime minister there. While speaking to reporters at Joint Base Andrews, Trump said (time code 03:44):

I’m right now at 99% in Israel. I could run for prime minister, so maybe after I do this, I’ll go to Israel, run for prime minister. I had a poll this morning. I’m 99%. So that’s good.

It was not clear what opinion polling Trump was referring to in his May 20 comment. At the time, the fact-checking organization Lead Stories reported that it could find “no publicly available poll showing Donald Trump with 99% support in Israel.”

According to Israeli law, the country’s prime minister must be eligible for election to the Israeli Parliament, which is called the Knesset. This in turn requires that a person is an Israeli national. There was no evidence at the time of this writing that Trump was an Israeli national, suggesting he was ineligible to become Israel’s prime minister, even if he genuinely wanted to run for office.

For further reading, Snopes previously investigated whether Trump said Iran asked him to be the country’s supreme leader.

Sources