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No, he is focusing on "Make America great again", not wasting endless sums of money fighting wars in the middle east that end up destroying the local christian population. His base has won absolutely nothing from the last few decades of neo con wars. His base got nothing but debt and mentally ill veterans from the fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq. Providing Israel with endless welfare is the opposite of America first.
Trumps loyalty should be to the US, not people whose loyalty is to other countries.
You're engaging in the same fallacy that Democrats often engage in when it comes to Trump voters and other Republicans: Assuming what their interests are. Trump spent the entire campaign season portraying himself as the protector of Israel, and Republican politicians routinely criticized Biden for the mere suggestion that Israel should make concessions in cease fire talks. Remember when he threatened to withdraw supply of offensive weapons and the backlash surrounding that. I don't think Trump coming in and saying that Israel would have to completely withdraw from Gaza and release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners would have played well during the election. Especially considering he made no bones about the fact that Ukraine would have to surrender territory. You may agree with Trump's actions here, but it runs contrary to what anyone could have reasonably expected based on his prior statements. Whether or not this constitutes selling out his base depends on whether those who wholeheartedly supported Israel up until now are willing to cast these loyalties aside in favor of Trump.
I don't actually think that he's going backwards on that. Have you paid any attention to the international reaction to Israel's efforts at ethnically cleansing Gaza? Huge swathes of the world are currently off limits for Israeli government visits due to their arrest warrants, and there are criminal prosecutions against vast numbers of individual soldiers as well. They're hurting themselves too - the example I used in discussions like this previously was the IDF soldier who killed himself because he wasn't able to live with the guilt and trauma he picked up crushing the meat out of innocent people with a bulldozer. This conflict is not good for Israel in any real sense (though it may be good for Netanyahu's personal position) and continuing to enable it isn't doing Israel any real favours. It actually makes an incredible amount of sense that he'd pursue a strategy like this after portraying himself as the Protector of Israel - if a drug addict asks for a lot of money to buy drugs and a free space to do them in, you're not really protecting them in any sense of the word by continuing to enable their addiction.
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Who exactly do you think Trump's "base" is. More specifically, who matters more, the average (R) voter, or the "donor class"? I can't find it again, but I remember a bit circulating right-wing circles online some years ago, quoting an interview with a Republican "campaign advisor" who got a little too honest with the interviewer and said that his job was basically to help GOP candidates more convincingly lie to red state rubes about how they're going to do the various stupid things these voters want, all the while knowing, as all Republican candidates do, that once in office their job will be to do none of that, and deliver what the deep-pocket donors want instead.
"Should be" ≠ "is."
I've been heavily persuaded by thinkers like Yarvin and Parvini (who have many disagreements) about how elite backers matter so much more than the peasant masses who have nothing but their (meaningless) votes, and "democracy" is a sham. For example, the H1B fight: Musk is going to get his way, because he matters, and millions of "Trump voters" simply don't.
For an alternative narrative (which I don't exactly share) I know some right-wing anti-Trump people — a very much different group from the "Never Trumper" crowd — who have their own narrative about 'who is Trump's real base.' These acquaintances held that the "Russian collusion" narrative was pretty much correct in all the broad strokes… except for having the wrong country. They argued that when people say that Trump didn't (or wasn't able to) deliver for his base in his first term, they're wrong: Trump very much did deliver what his actual backers, the people who installed him in the White House, put him there to do: "moving the embassy to Jerusalem and tax cuts for (((billionaires)))." (Cue more comments about Kushner, "the Tribe," "ZOG," and how it would have been better if Harris won, because at least then we'd have more attention paid to the "ongoing genocide" in Gaza, etc.)
And further, I'd conclude by asking why we should be trying to "make America great again" when "American greatness" is what got Western Civilization into the mess it's in in the first place.
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