How Dermer became the ‘guy’ Trump refused to let go

At midday, by the snack machine in the basement of the U.S. Senate office building, I suddenly spotted none other than Ron Dermer. The year was 2015. Dermer was then Israel’s ambassador to the United States in Washington. Snacks?! Was that really what the most senior Israeli envoy in the United States was missing?

A few weeks earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had delivered his historic address to Congress against the nuclear deal between then-U.S. President Barack Obama and Iran. Dermer, the one who stitched that speech together and pushed Netanyahu to give it, looked exhausted.

“We haven’t had a bite since morning,” said the aide by his side. So yes, they were hunting for a kosher snack so that the ambassador could get a little energy before the next meeting.

What are you doing here? I asked. “Running from one meeting to the next with senators to explain the dangers of the nuclear deal,” Dermer replied. “Presumably, Republican senators, since the Democrats were with Obama, who was leading the agreement,” I said.

“No,” answered the ambassador. “The Republicans are with us. We’re trying to persuade the Democrats.”

That small incident showed, yet again, the yawning gap between what so many people who don’t know Ron Dermer wrote and said about him, or envied him for, and who the man actually is.

While Dermer was being smeared in those days as someone supposedly boycotted by the Democratic Party, he was meeting, one after another, with its leadership.

As will be told below, Dermer became the only Israeli ambassador ever to host at Israel’s embassy in Washington a sitting U.S. president, Barack Obama, and his vice president, Joe Biden, both Democrats.

Dermer’s roots

Ron Dermer was born in Miami Beach, Fla., in 1971. He was blessed with a sharp mind, immense knowledge, an excellent gift for expression, considerable physical strength and a steely character forged under difficult circumstances. His father died two weeks before his bar mitzvah. He lost his first wife not long after they married. It did not break Dermer; it steeled him.

Maybe that is related, maybe it is not. Dermer knows how to listen, but it is hard to the point of impossible to move him from his position. His stubbornness is legendary. In meetings, he is more of a lecturer than an interlocutor. That is the man.

His father, Jay Dermer, served as the Democratic mayor of Miami Beach. He, incidentally, defeated Elliott Roosevelt, a war hero and son of the legendary president.

Dermer’s brother, David, was later elected to the same office. The apples did not fall far from the tree. They also show Ron could have reached the highest positions in American politics or business, but he chose the Land of Israel over the land of gold.

One of his university professors, Frank Luntz, recognized his unique talents. “The most gifted student I ever had,” he said, and invited him to work at his polling firm. Through that professor, a connection was born with Natan Sharansky.

In the second half of the 1990s, Dermer immigrated to Israel. He tried to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces, but it did not work out. Aharon Barak, who met Dermer in social settings, was also highly impressed and invited him frequently. At Barak’s home, Dermer met his wife, Rhoda.

His relationship with Sharansky produced their joint 2004 book, The Case for Democracy. Then-President George W. Bush read it, was influenced by it and invited them to the White House. Sharansky is also the one who connected Dermer with Netanyahu back in 1999.

That first meeting did not go well. Already seasoned in polling analysis, Dermer predicted that Netanyahu would lose the upcoming election. A few weeks later, it turned out he was right.

Despite the false start, the ties tightened until Dermer and Netanyahu became almost a single unit. The trust between them is total. Their worldview is the same. They plan moves in detail with an analytical mind and trust each other completely.

That does not mean there were no arguments. Quite the opposite: Netanyahu knows that no disagreement with Dermer will ever leak. For his part, Dermer believes with absolute conviction that everything Netanyahu does is aimed at strengthening the Jewish people and their state. That is what interests him.

Rise up the ranks

In 2005, Netanyahu appointed him economic minister at the embassy in Washington, which required Dermer to renounce his U.S. citizenship. “I was proud to be an American,” he wrote then in an American newspaper.

In that role, Dermer persuaded U.S. states to pull their investments from Iran. He also helped draft the U.S.-Israel defense assistance agreement.

In 2009, when Netanyahu returned to the Prime Minister’s Office, he made Dermer his close adviser and the point man on the U.S. file. Together, from Jerusalem, they faced the pressure from the Obama administration, until in 2013, Netanyahu sent him back to America, this time as Israel’s ambassador in Washington.

Although he worked there, he flew to Israel countless times for face-to-face consultations with Netanyahu. That transatlantic grind, sometimes once a week or two, while being separated from family and serving as Israel’s most important ambassador, would have exhausted most people.

A decade later, Dermer organized Netanyahu’s historic 2015 speech against the nuclear deal. When Netanyahu hesitated, Dermer asked him: What is the point of sitting in the chair if you do not accept the invitation? Like his boss, Dermer woke up thinking about Iran and went to sleep the same way.

In the short term, the speech did some damage among Democrats, since it was seen as a slap at Obama. In the long term, however, it impressed upon the American elite the severity of the Iranian threat and built legitimacy for striking Iran’s nuclear facilities a decade later.

Dermer’s scramble among senators at that time, which I witnessed with my own eyes, also made it harder for Obama to get the deal through Congress and, in due course, made it easier for U.S. President Donald Trump to pull out.

Even if his fight against the nuclear deal remains controversial, Dermer’s other achievements are consensus material. The latest Gaza war agreement brought hostages home and won broad public support. Again, this stands in absolute contrast to the lies spread against the departing minister, as if he preferred prolonging the war to returning the captives.

Contrary to false media reports, Dermer is also the person who persuaded Trump a year ago that the hostages were alive. Around these very days last year, the then president-elect was convinced they had all died and even said so publicly.

When Dermer met him at Mar-a-Lago, Trump hunched over, imitating the conditions of captivity, and said, “No one can survive like that.” Dermer immediately corrected him: “According to our intelligence, at least 50 are alive.” From that moment, Trump stopped saying the hostages were dead.

From that meeting until June 2025, Dermer was the driving force in harnessing the administration to a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In contrast to the “Don’t” Israel received from Joe Biden about expanding the war, Dermer and Netanyahu convinced Trump that action against Iran would serve American interests.

Enthused by the Israeli celebration in Tehran’s skies, Trump ultimately delivered the finishing blow by dispatching B-2 bombers.

It is no exaggeration to say that in that act Dermer helped save Israel and the world alike from a clear and present danger. As with his other actions, he achieved this precisely because he is known not to seek personal gain, power, headlines or political advancement. Everyone who knows Dermer knows his motives are pure.

Amazingly, despite being glued to Netanyahu for 25 years, he has always kept his distance from politics and the many affairs surrounding the prime minister and his family.

Dermer operates under complete compartmentalization. His only job there is one is to keep quiet. That secrecy enabled what is probably his greatest achievement: the Abraham Accords.

“You know how many people in Israel knew about the accords before they were announced?” he likes to ask rhetorically. “Three. Had there been more, it would probably have leaked, and there would have been no accords.”

Dermer could persuade Trump and his team to take all those steps thanks to both a worldview similar to that of Republicans and to considerable interpersonal savvy. His first meeting with Trump was in 2014. It was by chance, and at the time, no one imagined Trump would even enter American politics.

They met at a Wharton School alumni conference at the University of Pennsylvania. As Israel’s ambassador, Dermer told Trump, then a businessman, that he was the reason he had gone to study at Wharton. He had read Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal, and dreamed of becoming a successful businessman like him.

Trump remembered the exchange very well. Two years later, after stunning the world by winning the presidency, he phoned Netanyahu and asked him to keep his “guy” in Washington. The Dermer family, which had been preparing to return to Israel in 2016, unpacked and signed on for four more years in the U.S. Capitol.

That sacrifice—the lifestyle of endless absences from home and innumerable flights to the U.S.—lies behind a line in his resignation letter on Tuesday: “I thank my family, and especially my wife, Rhoda, for their willingness to sacrifice so much over the past two decades, and even more so in the past three years, so that I could serve the one and only Jewish state.”

As noted, Dermer knew how to work not only with Trump and his team, but also with Democrats and even their president, Barack Obama. Precisely after the big clash between Obama and Netanyahu over the nuclear deal in 2015, Dermer understood that the president would want to make amends with Israel.

A decision by Yad Vashem crossed his desk as ambassador: to award the Righteous Among the Nations medal to an American soldier who was captured by the Nazis in World War II. The soldier, Roddie Edmonds, saved hundreds of Jews who were prisoners with him in the camp and never told of it during his lifetime.

Dermer assessed that Obama would agree to present the medal himself to Edmonds’ son. He therefore submitted a personal invitation to Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, to confer the medal at a ceremony at the embassy.

Indeed, a few months later, Obama came and spoke. In those days, an extremely cold snap threatened to cancel the event. But Dermer, so determined to hold it, came to clear the snow himself, to set an example for hesitant embassy employees.

It was the first time a Righteous Among the Nations ceremony was held outside Israel. Aside from former President Bill Clinton’s condolence visit after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, it was the only time in 77 years of the state that a sitting American president came to the Israeli embassy in Washington.

What else? Dermer signed the largest-ever U.S. security assistance package with Israel, also achieved under the Obama administration. In 2020, he helped bring COVID-19 vaccines to Israel, which, as you will recall, was the first country in the world to roll them out to the public. Along with Amos Hochstein and the Biden administration, Dermer wove the Lebanon war ceasefire arrangement about a year ago, which allows Israel to retain freedom of action in Lebanon.

Over the years, Dermer put his talents to work explaining Israel’s case to the world, including to the toughest interviewers. On the other hand, in the only interview he ever gave the Hebrew media, he explained why he cut himself off from it.

In one of our series of meetings, he told me: “In 2009, a journalist at a major outlet published a report claiming that Netanyahu had cursed, in a closed conversation, advisers to President Obama. I had known Netanyahu long enough to know he does not use that kind of language and would never say the phrase the reporter attributed to him. It did not bother the reporter, who claimed the comments had created a diplomatic crisis.

“I called him and said: ‘You are attacking us over a crisis between the countries when you are the one who created the crisis, because the comments were never said. You did not even bother to ask for a response.’ He yelled that he was a free journalist.

“I found myself spending hours dealing with nonsense that had been written or said. In the end, I asked myself whether that investment was helping me advance Israel’s interests, and I realized it was not. So I preferred to do the work quietly.”

This article was originally published in Israel Hayom.