A follow up to last night’s post on Mike Huckabee, now U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Axios reports that Donald Trump is pretty conspicuously declining to endorse Benjamin Netanyahu for Israel’s October election. I would be remiss I didn’t explicitly note that it is unprecedented and outrageous that a U.S. president is even considering a formal endorsement in the election of an allied country. They’ve often had preferences of course. But we used to have respect for the internal affairs of foreign governments, especially allied ones. In any case, we don’t now. And here we are.

This appears to be part of Trump’s deliberate move away from Israel and the closely related annoyance that Israel continues to complicate his other priorities, which are one part conventional geopolitics and one part corrupt deals with various Gulf States. But there’s another factor Axios points to which we’re familiar with from the U.S. endorsement game. Netanyahu’s polls look bad. And Trump doesn’t want to back a loser.

One of our great doctrines here in the Editors’ Blog is that all power is unitary. Lose or gain it in one place, and you lose or gain it in equal measure everywhere else. That’s catching up with Donald Trump. He got into the Iran War as a way to escape the emotionally crushing experience of declining popularity and power at home. But his ebbing power went with him to the Persian Gulf. And now it’s arrived in Israel, too. This was obscured for a while by the fact that the U.S. has almost unimaginable military power and a constitution which, as it has evolved if not how it was originally intended, puts almost no short-term limits on a president’s ability to wage war. But the two were always umbilically connected. It was the pain of bad news at home that spurred Trump to jump so recklessly into his Iran debacle. And it is the same unpopularity that has him so desperate to end high gas prices and inflation before the midterms. They’re all connected.

Trump has no poker face. To live in Trump’s era is not only to see his inner life but to be engulfed by it. It’s hard to think of a case in which the deciding player between warring powers has more clearly signaled his desperate desire to get out of a conflict on almost any terms. The Iranians have internet too. And they can see all of this. They have now issued a fresh set of new demands: end sanctions, leave the region, pay reparations, release frozen assets and more — in addition to make the Strait of Hormuz a permanent Iranian toll road. More or less total capitulation.

As part of his round of media appearances JD Vance was asked today about critics of Donald Trump’s Iran deal in the Israeli government. He said …

Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time. If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.

Just on the facts it’s pretty hard to disagree. This is not only an example of how fast things can change for you in Trumpworld. It is also a perfect illustration of how your own loyalism, your own Trumpiness almost always gets wheeled around and used against it as soon as you zig when you were supposed to zag. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has left Israel marvelously exposed and isolated. And he seems increasingly likely to pay the price for that in October.

And what is Israel going to do now? Leverage its relationships with Democrats to push back against Trump’s diktats? Good luck with that.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Donald Trump’s recent comments (and how they’re being covered), Mike Pence’s refusal to endorse his old boss and Republicans’ embrace of Bibi Netanyahu.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.