American voters were crazy enough once before
Brian Beutler offers thoughts on Donald Trump dissing the Israeli prime minister on Wednesday when Benjamin Netanyahu is down. And Netanyahu is down after the Hamas attack last Saturday per Noga Tarnopolsky at Intelligencer: Netanyahu Is Losing the War at Home.
It wasn’t Israel’s failure to aid in Trump’s drone strike on Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani that soured Trump on the Israeli PM, as Trump’s Florida rally comments suggest. Nor even Netanyahu upstaging Trump at a past White House event.
Trump has long sought to emphasize his appeal to Jewish Americans and has complained when he feels he has not been recognized sufficiently. Even after having left office, Trump has maintained he has done more for Israel and the Middle East than any other U.S. president, holding up the historic peace agreements he forged with Arab nations.
He wants Jewish votes. They owe him. Yet 7 in 10 overall support Democrats.
Beutler writes:
But then I recalled the news I’d tracked in recent days, including Netanyahu’s fulsome praise of Biden, and the mayor of Tel Aviv’s similar expression gratitude, and it hit me: THAT’S what Trump’s mad about. The mere acknowledgement of Biden’s steadfast—I’d call it questionably unquestioning—support for Israel has all but stamped out the MAGA propaganda, limiting its potential to reach and deceive voters who aren’t already part of the cult.
I logged that suspicion here, and Politico’s Jonathan Lemire quickly confirmed it—but the revelation went largely unnoticed. When isn’t Trump lashing out at someone he perceives to be disloyal?
We should ignore the temptation to write this off as another ego-driven Trump outburst and grapple seriously with the implications—what does it mean that Trump thought Netanyahu owed him political favors, even now, and is pissed that they weren’t delivered?
The answer is more sinister than selfishness.
Consider what Trump thought he might get from Netanyahu (what, for all we know, he or an intermediary may have asked for explicitly): He wanted Bibi, beset by events in his own country, to antagonize the U.S. government. To harm Israel’s vital interests, for the solitary purpose of helping Trump in the presidential election. At the very least, Trump wanted Netanyahu to let horrible slanders go uncontested.
We don’t need to imagine hidden entreaties or favors to think Trump seriously expected Netanyahu to play along. It’s a big part of why he was so solicitous of Netanyahu during his administration. And over four years he compiled a record of one-sidedness that (quite unfortunately) made him a popular and influential figure in Israel. Trump may very well be annoyed by this or that (in his remarks he specifically complained of Netanyahu’s supposed ambivalence over a U.S. drone strike that killed Iran’s top security official, Qassim Soleimani, in 2020). But all of that stuff falls low on Trump’s unwritten ledger of political debts. Loyalty to him comes first. Netanyahu, weakened abruptly by the justified wrath of the Israeli population, didn’t deliver. So Trump, in his pathological vindictiveness, fed him to them.
Whatever Trump imagined Netanyahu might do for him in the midst of a mass national trauma, he revealed something more general. It is not just his hope, it is his expectation, that the whole network of autocrats he placated and toadied to during his presidency and afterward will abuse their offices however they can to help him return to power in 2024.
Trump is all about what’s in it for Trump. But you knew that.
Anyone leaning toward Trump who does not needs reminding over and over and over. Fool me once, as George W. Bush mangled the expression:
The first time around, before colluding became a lifestyle for him, Trump had never been president, and thus had weak relationships with foreign leaders, to the extent he had them at all. He knew through back channels that Russia wanted to help his campaign, and he accepted the offer in clumsy ways—“Russia, if you’re listening…” and Don Jr.’s infamous “if it’s what you say, I love it” email, which only surfaced after it was too late.
Trump’s brazenness, along with his seeming unelectability, suckered Democrats and the rest of the government into under-reacting. The Obama administration approached the congressional leadership during the campaign seeking a public, bipartisan warning about Russian election interference, but bent to Mitch McConnell who sabotaged the united front and threatened to cry foul if Democrats released the statement on their own. He didn’t mind Trump working in concert with Russia and he definitely didn’t want to sign his name to any public admonition that a GOP campaign was up to something so unpatriotic.
There’s no use second-guessing that decision seven years later, but it’s worth revisiting before Trump secures the GOP presidential nomination for the third time. Now we know he can win; now we know better.
His back against multiple legal walls, Trump is more treacherous (and crazier) than ever.