The White House has repeatedly sounded a simple but effective message: Trust the plan.

The slogan — with ostensible origins in the QAnon conspiracy theory movement — has been applied to a range of issues. In January, the Labor Department posted a photo of US President Donald Trump saluting, with the caption Trust the Plan. Trust Trump.

After prominent antisemitic podcaster Tucker Carlson visited the Oval Office in January, a White House official told Jewish activist Shabbos Kestenbaum, “Just trust the plan.”

It was also the approach that Israelis took toward the president on most issues. Trump and his advisers — especially top envoy Steve Witkoff — might occasionally have said things that confused Israel and even undermined its interests, but they trusted that he was a president who could distinguish good from evil, and was not about to be pushed around by Iran and friends.

Trump’s decision to unleash an all-out bombing campaign against Iran alongside Israel seemed to confirm the wisdom of putting trust in the US leader. Sure, Trump might have engaged in direct talks with Iran, but, they reasoned, he saw right through their attempts to prevaricate and delay and embarked on a war that could damage him politically because he knew it was right.

Trust the Plan. Trust Trump. pic.twitter.com/RX1yjl35GX — U.S. Department of Labor (@USDOL) January 8, 2026

Trust the Plan. Trust Trump. pic.twitter.com/RX1yjl35GX

— U.S. Department of Labor (@USDOL) January 8, 2026

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu certainly acts like he fully trusts Trump. In a press conference last week, he lauded “the wisdom and the courage of President Trump’s decision, and his leadership, and the fact that we’re working together.”

“America is not fighting for Israel. America is fighting with Israel for a common goal: to protect our future, to protect civilization against these barbarians,” Netanyahu said.

They might not be fighting together for long.

After delivering a seemingly unequivocal deadline to Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, Trump seems to have equivocated.

In a bombshell announcement Monday, Trump revealed that his administration has been engaged in “productive” talks with Iran regarding a “complete and total resolution” of hostilities, leading him to postpone his pledge to bomb Iran’s energy sites.

He followed that up by claiming that the US had effectively achieved “regime change” in Iran because so many of its leaders are dead.

Israelis who had trusted the plan now fear there is no plan and wonder if Trump can still be trusted.

It seems that Jerusalem was caught off guard by the announcement from the mercurial president.

As of 4:30 p.m. Israel time, hours after Trump dropped his bombshell, Netanyahu and his office had yet to formulate a public reaction. Just the day before, the IDF said Israel expects to fight for “several more weeks” to achieve its goals in Iran, indicating that even if it knew the US was talking to Iran, it did not think the negotiations would go anywhere.

“This was always a possibility,” said Israel’s former ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren.

There are precedents over the past year for Trump accepting a hasty deal that solves nothing in order to extricate himself from a situation, even if it leaves others in the lurch.

In May, Trump came to a surprise deal with the Houthis in Yemen that simply returned the situation in the Red Sea to the status quo before the seven-week-long bombing campaign. The agreement ended attacks on US vessels, but allowed the Houthis to keep shooting at Israel and others using the waterway.

Israeli officials told Hebrew media outlets at the time that Washington did not give Jerusalem advance notice of the announcement, and that Israel was surprised by it.

That deal, not surprisingly, was negotiated by Witkoff and brokered by Oman.

At the end of the 12-day June war, Israel promised to “forcefully strike the heart of Tehran” in reaction to an attack that broke the fresh ceasefire. Trump’s response was to berate Israel and publicly force it to turn its planes around.

With the war weighing on Trump’s political prospects and his economic agenda, his domestic allies had been pushing for an exit strategy. At the same time, key US partners in the Middle East, such as Turkey, had stepped up efforts to find a diplomatic way out of the fighting, creating a ramp that could work for Trump, even if not for Israel.

“I’m worried,” said American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Danielle Pletka.

“There will be a temptation to pull an Obama and run for the hills prematurely,” she said, referring to the 44th US president. “On the one hand, the president has the right principles and goals, on the other, he’s facing internal and external pressure to allow the regime to continue, to punt the problem to another president.”

Now Netanyahu has to clarify whether it can still strike Iran, and whether Trump is insisting that Iran stop firing at Israel during the five-day period he set aside for talks.

Netanyahu also has to do all he can now to ensure that Israel’s core interests — stopping Iran’s nuclear program, its production of ballistic missiles and its support for Hamas and Hezbollah — are addressed in a potential ceasefire agreement.

He also has to keep his eye on Lebanon. There is a distinct possibility that Iran will insist that its strongest proxy, Hezbollah, survives as well.

Even though Israel is gearing up for a major ground operation against Hezbollah, which has resisted disarming under a previous ceasefire deal, Trump could overrule those plans as well. The same Middle Eastern allies who have been pushing Trump to stop the war in Iran are also trying to forestall an Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

“We have no choice with Iran, but with Lebanon, we can’t,” said Oren. “Lebanon is an existential issue.”

The US-Israel alliance, like the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu, reached new heights with the joint campaign against Iran. But it came with a clear price.

As long as Israel crafted a plan with Trump, it was never really Israel’s plan at all.

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