https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-makes-hamas-massacre-israelis-174536214.html
The context is important. We are just days removed from a terrorist attack that has been described as
Israel’s 9/11. Babies were killed and their bodies desecrated. Women were raped. Elderly people were abducted. Hostages (
including Americans) are missing. The nation is still mourning.
And, in the wake of all of this, Trump thinks this is a good time to dredge up an old indignity by the prime minister—someone he had previously lavished with praise and called a friend.
It’s about him. It’s
always about him. In the wake of
Hamas’ savage terrorist
attack on
Israel, former president and presumptive Republican nominee
Donald Trump somehow found a way to make this all about him.
During a speech in West Palm Beach on Wednesday,
Trump criticized Israel’s prime minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu, over a past perceived slight, and praised Hezbollah terrorists—who have been exchanging fire with the Israel Defense Forces on a second front in the North of Israel—as “
smart.”
“I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. That was a very terrible thing,”
Trump said. (Note: Trump’s invocation of the words “
never forget” is likely accidental, if extraordinarily insensitive. But what else would we expect from a man who adopted the “
America First” slogan?)
Trump later added that, after the mission to take out Suleimani was successful, “Bibi tried to take credit for it.”
Translation: Never mind the terrorist attack,
Trump is the real victim.
Regardless of the merit of this (the veracity has yet to be confirmed), there is a time to air grievances and there is a time to comfort our friends. For any normal human being, this moment would call for the latter.
But who could be surprised? One of Trump’s first big political “scandals” came when he attacked John McCain, a former prisoner of war, for being captured.
Of course, there’s more to Trump’s criticism of Bibi than meets the eye. There’s
always more to the story when it comes to Trump.
Trump—who loves to praise evil strongmen like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un—wouldn’t publicly criticize Bibi were it not for another perceived slight.
This affront was much worse and borderline unpardonable: After
Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election,
Netanyahu congratulated him.
If there’s one thing that really annoys Trump, it’s people who aren’t willing to perpetuate his big lie.
Say what you will about Bibi; he wasn’t about to let Trump’s reality distortion field force him to take sides against the man who was likely to be the next POTUS.
In Trump’s warped mind, though, Bibi should have been more loyal to Trump than he is to the truth… or Israel.
“Nobody did more for Bibi. And I liked Bibi... But I also like loyalty... Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake,” Trump was quoted as saying at the time, before adding: “I haven’t spoken to him since. F—- him.”
It’s tempting to dismiss Trump’s blather as laughable, but the stakes are high. At a time when Ukraine and Israel both face serious threats, should the leader of the free world be a thin-skinned and capricious president who
puts his own ego above all else?
Does America really want four more years of chaos and a president who is harder on allies than dictators?
