Former President Trump claimed on Friday that conflicts in the Middle East could escalate into a third World War if he loses the 2024 election.

The Republican nominee for president made those remarks as he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his Mar-a-Lago resort home. Netanyahu traveled to Florida to meet with Trump after meeting with President Biden and presumptive Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington, D.C., earlier this week, following his Wednesday address to a joint session of Congress.  

At Mar-a-Lago, Trump told reporters that Harris is ‘worse’ on Middle East issues and claimed Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza could expand into a wider regional conflict if she succeeds Biden, who announced Sunday that he would not seek re-election. 

‘We’ll see how it goes. But if it all works out, if we win, it’ll be very simple. It’s all going to work out. And very quickly,’ Trump said. ‘If we don’t, you’re going to end up with major wars in the Middle East. And maybe a third World war. You are closer to a third World War right now than at any time since the Second World War. We’ve never been so close because we have incompetent people running the country.’ 

Trump’s remarks come amid a reported diplomatic flare-up between Harris and Netanyahu which occurred after their meeting Thursday. 

In comments after the meeting, Harris said she told the Israeli prime minister that she ‘will always ensure that Israel is able to defend itself, including from Iran and Iran-backed militias such as Hamas and Hezbollah.’ 

‘I also expressed with the Prime Minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians. And I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there,’ she added, calling for an end to the war and the release of all hostages held in Hamas captivity. 

Harris’ criticisms of Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war reportedly irked Netanyahu, according to Axios, who has repeatedly said fighting must continue until Hamas is eliminated, even if hostages are released. 

Asked about Harris’ comments Friday, Netanyahu told reporters Israel still hopes for a cease-fire deal.

‘We’re trying to get one. And I think, to the extent that Hamas understands that there’s no daylight between Israel and the United States, that expedites the deal. And I hope that those comments don’t change that,’ Netanyahu said. 

The Mar-a-Lago meeting is face-to-face contact Netanyahu has had with Trump since the Republican nominee left the White House in 2020. Their relationship strained when Netanyahu congratulated President-elect Biden on his victory that year, which prompted Trump to call out the Israeli leader. ‘I haven’t spoken to him since,’ Trump told Israeli journalist Barak Ravid that year. ‘F–k him,’ the former president added.

Now, Netanyahu is making an effort to make amends and secure Trump’s support for Israel in the war against Gaza, should the Republican candidate return to the White House after the November election. 

In Trump’s home, the Israeli leader presented him with a photo of one of the Bibas toddlers, children who are still held captive by Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

Netanyahu said the picture was given to him by the toddlers’ grandfather, who asked him to share it with Trump. 

‘Wow, that’s very moving,’ Trump said, accepting the photograph. ‘We’ll get that taken care of.’ 

Protesters gathered in West Palm Beach, Florida, to greet Netanyahu as his plane landed. The prime minister’s visit to the nation’s capital earlier this week sparked pro-Hamas demonstrations, which featured antisemitic slogans, calls for Israel’s eradication, vandalism and heated confrontations with D.C. police.   

In his address to Congress, Netanyahu accused Iran of funding the protests and tore into the demonstrators, who have demanded an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.

‘I have a message for these protesters. When the tyrants of Tehran, who hang gays from cranes and murder women for not covering their hair, are praising, promoting and funding you, you have officially become Iran’s useful idiots,’ Netanyahu said Wednesday. 

‘Some of these protesters hold up signs proclaiming gays for Gaza. They might as well hold up signs saying ‘Chickens for KFC.’ These protesters chant ‘From the river to the sea.’ But many don’t have a clue what river and what sea they’re talking about.’

The war in Gaza has raged since Hamas’ mass slaughter of nearly 1,200 people, including more than 30 Americans, in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas continues to hold more than 100 hostages in Gaza, including eight Americans.

Fox News Digital’s Benjamin Weinthal and Greg Norman contributed to this report. 

Former President Trump announced to a crowd Friday night he ‘just took off the last bandage’ from his ear after an attempted assassination nearly two weeks ago.

The Believer’s Summit, hosted by Turning Point Action in West Palm Beach, focused on reaching voters of faith. Dr. Ben Carson, former HUD Secretary, preceded the former president.

‘And we want to thank each and every one of the believers in this room for your prayers and your incredible support. I really did appreciate it,’ Trump said.

‘Something was working. That we know. Something was working. So, I thank you very much. And I stand before you tonight, thanks to the power of prayer and the grace of Almighty God,’ he added.

‘As I think you can see, I’ve recovered well. And, in fact, I just took off the last bandage off of my ear.’

The crowd roared with applause as the former president gestured to his injured ear.

‘I just got it off,’ he clarified. ‘I took it off for this group. I don’t know why I did that for this group, but that’s it. I think that’s it.’

Trump’s speech included attacks against his presumptive Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, calling the vice president ‘a bum.’

‘Three weeks ago, she was a bum, a failed vice president and a failed administration with millions of people crossing. And she was the border czar. Now they’re trying to say she never was,’ the former president said.

‘If radical liberal Kamala Harris gets in and, by the way, there are numerous ways of saying her name, they were explaining to me. … I said, don’t worry about it.

‘Doesn’t matter what I say. I couldn’t care less if I mispronounce it or not. I couldn’t care less.’

Dr. Ronny Jackson, the former White House doctor, released a letter earlier Friday offering an update on Trump’s health after the assassination attempt July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania.

A top Democratic super PAC has launched a massive ad buy across several battleground states to boost Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential candidacy leading up to the Democratic Party’s convention in Chicago next month.

Future Forward, the largest Democratic-leaning super PAC, announced this week it will spend $50 million supporting Harris in six states in the next three weeks ahead of the convention in Chicago, The Washington Post reported. 

Additionally, the outlet reported that the second-largest independent supporter of Democrats, American Bridge 21st Century, will start placing ads Friday in the key swing state of Michigan.

On top of that, Women Vote, part of the Emily’s List network, announced Thursday it was spending $2 million to target younger women in four battleground states. 

‘We’re ready to hit the ground running to make sure voters know that Kamala Harris will be a president that fights for them,’ Future Forward President Chauncey McLean told The Washington Post Thursday. 

‘She is focused on improving the lives of all Americans, while Donald Trump is only focused on himself.’

David Axelrod, a former top adviser to former President Obama, called the move a ‘big development.’

‘Pro-Harris SuperPAC to launch major buy in the battleground states, with an initial spot to highlight her battles as a DA, attorney general and VP,’ Axelrod posted on X.

‘Essential air cover, especially as the Trump forces spend to define her negatively.’

One of the ads will describe Harris as ‘the district attorney who protected children from sexual predators’ and ‘the attorney general who stood up to the big banks to protect homeowners and won.’

The Washington Post reported that MAGA Inc. is also planning to spend $32 million going after Harris before Labor Day, which will bring its total spending during that period to $72 million. 

Fox News Digital reached out to the Trump campaign for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

A new survey compiled after Biden dropped out of the race reveals Trump and Harris are tied in the crucial swing state of Michigan despite the former president’s previous lead by nearly double digits.

National polls have sent mixed signals, with some showing a tie and some showing a slight lead for either candidate. 

The New York Times/Siena College released a new survey this week that found Trump leads Harris by only one percentage point among likely voters, 48% to 47%. Among registered voters, Trump led Harris by two percentage points. 

Fox News Digital’s Aubrie Spady contributed to this report

The office of a House Democrat who played a prominent role in former President Trump’s first impeachment is now pushing back against GOP-fueled criticism that he should not be on the task force investigating the attempted assassination of the former president.

Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., who came under fire last year for saying that Trump ‘has to be eliminated,’ is among the Democrats being considered for a place on the bipartisan commission to study the July 13 shooting at Trump’s Butler, Pennsylvania, rally, a source familiar with the matter told Fox News Digital. 

‘As someone with a lifelong commitment to democracy and the rule of law, Congressman Goldman immediately clarified a misstatement from last November to emphasize his strong condemnation of all political violence. The Congressman demonstrated with pointed questioning during congressional hearings last week that the Secret Service must be held accountable for its unacceptable security lapse, and he is determined to ensure such a failure never happens again,’ Goldman’s spokesperson Madison Andrus told Fox News Digital.

Goldman first came to national prominence as Democrats’ lead counsel during Trump’s first impeachment trial. He has remained a vocal Trump critic since coming to Congress in January 2023.

His potential placement on the commission has already invoked the ire of Trump allies since first being reported in Punchbowl News on Friday morning.

Among those leading the criticism is Donald Trump Jr., who recalled that Goldman had said that Trump needed to be ‘eliminated,’ in a November 2023 MSNBC interview, which Goldman has since apologized for.

‘Democrats are trying to put Dan Goldman on the committee to investigate the assassination attempt. Just weeks ago he called for DJT to be ‘eliminated.’ Probably not the best person to have on this task force,’ Trump Jr. wrote on X.

Goldman wrote on X in November 2023, ‘Yesterday on TV, I mistakenly used the wrong word to express the importance for America that Donald Trump doesn’t become President again. While he must be defeated, I certainly wish no harm to him and do not condone political violence. I apologize for the poor choice of words.’

Philip Letsou, deputy communications director for the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, wrote on the site, ‘Democrats are evidently planning on stacking the task force to investigate the assassination attempt on Trump with conspiracy theorists like Dan Goldman.’

The House voted to establish the commission in a unanimous 416-0 vote last week. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has said the panel will have seven Republicans and six Democrats, chosen by himself and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., respectively.

As of Friday morning, Jeffries’ office told Fox News Digital that no final decisions had been made.

But a second source who spoke with Fox News Digital said that another possible contender is Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md., who served as State’s Attorney for Prince George’s County for nearly a decade from 2003 until 2011, before coming to Congress in 2023.

On the GOP side, a senior Republican lawmaker told Fox News Digital that ‘it seems like half our members want to be on the task force.’

A third source who spoke with Fox News Digital said that Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., was in strong consideration to play a prominent role on the panel. Kelly, whose district the shooting took place in, was present when the shooting occurred.

Kelly was also the leader of the resolution establishing the task force that passed the House this week.

Sunday marks 100 days until Election Day 2024.

It also marks one week since President Biden’s political landscape-altering announcement that he was suspending his re-election rematch against former President Trump.

Biden made his move amid mounting pressure from within the Democratic Party for him to drop out after a disastrous performance in last month’s first presidential debate with Trump.

The embattled president’s immediate backing of Vice President Kamala Harris last Sunday ignited a surge of endorsements for the vice president by Democratic governors, senators, House members and other party leaders. Within 36 hours, Harris announced that she had locked up her party’s nomination by landing the verbal backing of a majority of the nearly 4,000 delegates to next month’s Democratic National Convention. 

Former President Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama on Friday became the final major party leaders to endorse the vice president.

Harris also hauled in a staggering $129 million in fundraising following Biden’s announcement, which her campaign touted on Thursday morning.

‘It’s go-time for both sides,’ longtime Republican consultant David Kochel told Fox News.

Besides uniting and exciting Democrats, the replacement of Biden by his vice president as the party’s standard-bearer – which is expected to become official during a virtual roll call of convention delegates that starts on Aug. 1 – has given Harris a bump in public opinion polling.

What was once a margin-of-error race between Biden and Trump had turned into a clear edge for the former president in the weeks after their June 27 debate showdown in Atlanta. However, with Harris now at the top of the ticket and Biden out of the race, surveys indicate it is back to a margin-of-error race.

‘Instead of what was shaping up to be a Trump win, America has a real, bona fide race on its hands,’ veteran political scientist and New England College President Wayne Lesperance said. ‘Game on.’

While Harris faces the monumental task of going from zero to 60 in an extremely condensed timeline, she is not starting from scratch, as she immediately inherited Biden’s large campaign apparatus with its vast ground-game resources in the key swing states.

However, Harris does face a crucial immediate task – choosing a running mate – which could come as early as the next week or two.

Biden and Trump are both well-known commodities to American voters.

However, Kochel, a veteran of numerous GOP presidential campaigns who remained neutral in the 2024 Republican primary, emphasized that most Americans know so little about the vice president’s record and that both the Trump and Harris campaigns are ‘in a race to define’ Harris.

In his first campaign rally since the presidential race was upended, Trump did not waste any time in trying to define his new opponent.

At a rally in the crucial battleground state of North Carolina, the Republican presidential nominee repeatedly took aim at Harris, whom he derogatorily called ‘lying Kamala Harris.’

Trump aimed to paint Harris as the ‘most incompetent and far-left vice president in American history.’

The former president charged that Harris ‘has been the ultra-liberal driving force behind every single Biden catastrophe. She is a radical left lunatic who will destroy our country if she ever gets the chance to get into office.’ 

Additionally, pointing to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent, a far-left champion and two-time runner-up for the Democratic presidential nomination, Trump argued that Harris is ‘more liberal than Bernie Sanders. Can you believe it?’

Throughout his more than an hour and a half stream of comments, Trump repeatedly slammed the vice president over border security and crime, two top issues in the 2024 election.

Trump campaign spokesman and senior adviser Steven Cheung said that the former president’s team was ready to go on offense the moment Harris succeeded Biden as the Democrats’ standard-bearer.

‘There wasn’t any surprise. We were prepared for it. We had all our assets ready. We had all our content ready. It didn’t surprise anyone,’ Cheung told reporters ahead of the Trump rally.

Harris, pushing back, is pointing to her hefty law enforcement résumé as she spotlights Trump’s numerous legal controversies, including his 34 felony convictions two months ago in the first criminal trial of a former or current president.

‘As many of you know, before I was elected as vice president, before I was elected as a United States senator, I was the elected attorney general of California. Before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,’ Harris said Monday at an event at her campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.

‘Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type,’ she emphasized as she pointed to Trump’s multiple lawsuits and criminal cases, many of which are ongoing.

Harris repeated the line of attack the next day at a rally in Milwaukee.

With 100 days to go until Election Day, the rhetoric this past week on the campaign trail is just an appetizer of things to come.

Vice President Kamala Harris no longer supports a fracking ban, in a change in her stance during the last presidential election, her campaign said on Friday, according to a report. 

Before she dropped her bid for president in 2019 and joined President Biden’s ticket, she said in a CNN town hall ‘there’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.’

‘And starting with what we can do on day one around public lands, right?’ she continued. ‘And then there has to be legislation, but, yes, that’s something I’ve taken on in California. I have a history of working on this issue and to your point we have to just acknowledge that the residual impact of fracking is enormous in terms of the health and safety of communities.’

Harris also cosponsored the Green New Deal as a senator in 2019, a proposal to stem climate change that includes a ban on fracking. 

‘Climate change is real, and it poses an existential threat to us as human beings, and it is within our power to do something about it,’ Harris said on the campaign trail that year before exiting the race, according to The New York Times. ‘I am supporting the Green New Deal.’

However, Biden’s campaign and his administration have not backed banning fracking despite Biden once saying during a primary debate ‘We would make sure it’s eliminated.’ His campaign later clarified that he ‘supports eliminating subsidies for coal and gas and deploying carbon capture.’   

Since Biden announced he is dropping out of the race and endorsed Harris last Sunday, she has moderated some of her positions from her 2019 run, in which she embraced more progressive policies. 

Trump was quick to paint her as a ‘radical liberal’ since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Harris is the ‘most incompetent and far-left vice president in American history,’ the former president told a rally crowd in Charlotte on Wednesday. 

Trump charged that Harris ‘has been the ultra-liberal driving force behind every single Biden catastrophe. She is a radical left lunatic who will destroy our country if she ever gets the chance to get into office.’ 

He added, ‘She wants no fracking. You’re going to be paying a lot of money. You’re going to be paying so much. You’re going to say ‘bring back Trump.’’

Telling The Hill that Harris no longer wants to ban fracking, her campaign pushed back on Trump’s rhetoric. 

‘Trump’s false claims about fracking bans are an obvious attempt to distract from his own plans to enrich oil and gas executives at the expense of the middle class,’ the campaign told The Hill. ‘The Biden-Harris Administration passed the largest ever climate change legislation and under their leadership, America now has the highest ever domestic energy production,’ the spokesperson said in an email. ‘This Administration created 300,000 energy jobs, while Trump lost nearly a million and his Project 2025 would undo the enormous progress we’ve made the past four years.’

In a statement to Fox News Digital, National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Mike Marinella, said, ‘Kamala Harris is the most far-left progressive presidential nominee in history, and extreme Democrats in the Rust Belt now own every single policy she supports.’

He added, ‘A fracking ban would be disastrous for workers and families, and extreme Democrats’ mission to force Biden to step aside and replace him with San Francisco radical Kamala Harris shows exactly how out of touch they are with their voters.’ 

Fox News Digital has reached out to Harris’ campaign for comment. 

Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser and Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this report.