Tag Archives: Trump

Netanyahu’s Legacy

This is a very difficult post for me to write, but I think it’s necessary.

When I was younger, I saw no conflict between being a patriotic American and wholeheartedly supporting the state of Israel. My father fought in the Second World War, and I lived through the horrifying disclosures that emerged in its aftermath–the pictures from the concentration camps, the “Black Book” detailing Nazi atrocities that my mother cried over…It was painfully obvious that Jews needed a country where they would be safe from the persistent and often deadly anti-Semitism that had followed us since biblical times. When my mother put her dimes and quarters in one of those ubiquitous “blue boxes” or sent dollars to plant trees in Israel, I saw no conflict between that support and a deep and abiding allegiance to my own country.

Benjamin Netanyahu has exploded that confidence. Worse, his regime has increased anti-Semitism against American Jews–and for that matter, Jews globally.

Substantial numbers of Israelis are opposed to Netanyahu, and I certainly don’t want to join the chorus of those painting all Israelis as culpable, just as a majority of Americans cannot be held responsible for Donald Trump. (Reams of polling confirm that a majority of us vehemently oppose the venality and stupidity of America’s current leadership.)

American Jews are currently re-examining what has been our reflexive support for Israel in the light of that country’s recent actions. If survey research is to be believed, a majority of us strongly disapprove of the Netanyahu government –especially what we view as a wildly disproportionate response to the horrific savagery of October 7th. Several American Jewish organizations publicly support the Palestinian cause and a two-state solution.

These days, it is quite possible to be pro-Jewish and anti-Zionist–at least, anti what Zionism has become–and that posture has become increasingly common.

It is also, obviously, possible to be pro-Zionist and profoundly anti-Semitic. Donald Trump is a pre-eminent example.

As a recent, thoughtful article in the Guardian, written by a Professor of Jewish studies, put it, the joint military strikes on Iran are forcing a “reckoning between two urgent, legitimate, and partially contradictory imperatives – and neither should be abandoned.”

Too many Jewish organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and American Jewish Committee (AJC) have suggested that this is the time to get behind the war effort and not to ask questions. But to say that Americans should not ask questions about the relationship between Israel and the United States because it might raise antisemitic conspiracy theories means handing over the tools of democratic accountability. That is too high a price.

A few days ago, I shared a post in which I distinguished between patriotism and nationalism. The position being taken by the ADL mistakes a nationalist reaction for a patriotic one. Genuinely patriotic Jews in Israel have argued against the actions of the Netanyahu government, and American organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace and JStreet have opposed those actions as well. It is possible to be pro-American and anti-MAGA, and it is equally possible to be pro-Israel and anti-Netanyahu. Indeed, I’d argue that being pro-America requires one to be anti-MAGA, and that being pro-Israel requires opposing Netanyahu.

As the Guardian article noted, there are plenty of people who have never needed a pretext to hate Jews, and in the wake of the attacks on Iran, “social media has been awash in the language of “puppet masters”, “dual loyalties” and insinuations that Jewish money bought American blood.” Far-right influencers increasingly echo Nazi propaganda. “This is the dual-edged reality of a political moment in which criticism of Israel has become newly acceptable across the American political spectrum.”

A healthy critique of the Israeli government is entirely appropriate, but it is different from–and does not and cannot excuse– anti-Semitism.

It’s hard to disagree with the Guardian article’s observation that “it is valuable and necessary to ask questions about Israel’s role in US foreign policy. It is not defensible to praise Holocaust revisionists or to blame the Jews for killing Jesus. And the fact that the same figures can go from one to the other is part of why this moment is so dangerous, and so fraught.”

The way to fight anti-semitism is not to stop criticizing Israeli policy. It is to distinguish between that policy and Jewish identity. Benjamin Netanyahu’s legacy will be that he has enabled anti-Semites to ignore that distinction–imperilling both Israel and the Jewish people.

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When Idiots Wage War…

In how many ways is Trump’s “war of whim” harming the United States? Let us count the ways…

Or perhaps we should just take note of the fact that we have deeply unserious, profoundly ignorant people in positions that require deep reservoirs of knowledge and expertise. Instead, we have an assortment of pompous pretenders and religious crackpots who have launched a war without even agreeing on its purpose.

Newsweek, among others, has reported on military leaders who have been telling troops that the Iran war has been launched as part of “God’s divine plan”– that “Trump and Jesus” are executing a divine purpose. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received some 200 complaints from roughly 50 military installations about U.S. commanders expressly linking Christianity to the “biblically sanctioned” war in Iran.

If those pronouncements–suggesting a throwback to the Crusades–weren’t horrifying enough, a post by Rick Wilson at Lincoln Square details the consequences for American readiness we can expect when attacks are launched by people who lack any detailed understanding of military strategy, let alone of the geopolitical context in which they are operating. As he writes, we are getting “a masterclass in what happens when a man who thinks black and white World War II movies in his head from the 1950s are the reality of modern combat between technologically advanced nations.”

Wilson picks apart Trump’s recent assertion that America has a “virtually unlimited supply” of “medium and upper-medium grade munitions.”

That’s not how our production and inventory of ammunition, guided weapons, and everything that leaves the barrel or the rail works. That’s not how industrial production works. That’s not how physics works. That’s not, as the kids say, how any of this works.

The United States does not have an “unlimited” supply of anything except debt, MAGA bots, and Trump mentions in the Epstein files.

As Wilson points out–and as Trump clearly doesn’t understand–every missile, every bomb, every 155mm shell, every variety of munition–“requires a supply chain, materials, rare earths, propellants, explosives, electronics, trained labor, and years of planning. Wars are not fought “forever” even in Trump’s brainfog alternate reality. There’s no imaginary Indiana Jones warehouse full of missiles.”

And about that context…

Trump has also bragged that we have additional “high-grade weaponry” stored for us in “outlying countries.” The irony of noting our dependence on the alliances and overseas basing structures he has constantly threatened, insulted, or tried to extort rather obviously escapes him.

Wilson has much more detail about the current state of U.S. armaments, and the gross incompetence of withholding support from Ukraine, and I encourage you to click through and read the entire essay for those facts and figures. But the firehose of lies and boasts about readiness aren’t even the worst part of this fiasco. As Wilson writes,

Now let’s talk about the dangerous part: casually boasting about stockpile levels. There is a reason serious leaders don’t blurt out operational readiness claims on social media, as if they’re bragging about golf handicaps.

Even if the numbers were accurate (and spoiler alert: he doesn’t know, and we’re burning through long-lead-time systems like a drunken sailor on shore leave), publicly telegraphing assessments of readiness, sufficiency, and shortfalls is the kind of thing professionals handle with classified briefings, not all-caps self-congratulation.

“Wars can be fought forever.” No, they can’t.

Wars chew through materiel, money, alliances, and political capital. Ask the Romans. Ask the British Empire. Ask the Nazis (the old ones, not the new ones). Ask the Soviets in Afghanistan. Ask anyone who served from 2003-2021 in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The idea that modern, high-intensity warfare can be sustained indefinitely without economic, industrial, and human consequences is the strategic equivalent of saying your credit card has “virtually unlimited” funds because the machine hasn’t declined you yet. Those $30,000 Shahed drones getting knocked down by $3,000,000 Patriots is a bad exchange rate.

So here we are–Trump (and MAGA Jesus?) have made domestic American society meaner while dramatically undermining our international influence and authority.

If I can distill this disaster into a single lesson, a cautionary tale, it would be this: failing to distinguish between celebrity and  leadership is failure to understand how the world works, and voters who made that mistake–twice!–along with those who didn’t bother to vote, are responsible for the dire consequences of handing power to a clown car filled with people who haven’t the slightest understanding of their jobs, or the world they inhabit.

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Who’s Benefitting?

The corruption on display by the Trump administration just keeps growing. Metastasizing, actually.

A reader recently sent me a video that reported on a little-noted element of ICE’s efforts to acquire warehouses. There’s been a lot of pushback from locals who object to the purchases on the grounds that they will be barely-veiled concentration camps, but I had not previously encountered a different objection, an itemization of the obscene overpayments being made— sales prices that are wildly inflated over assessed values and/or recent, previous acquisition costs, with the identity of those profiting from these transactions difficult to determine.

The woman in the linked video asks a reasonable question: who’s benefiting from this boondoggle?

It’s difficult to grasp the astonishing degree of corruption of the Trump administration–not just the official favors being done for the president’s billionaire cronies (the tax cuts and official permits and terminations of investigations begun under previous administrations), but the numerous outright bribes from foreign countries and domestic fat cats. (The Center for American Progress estimates the Trump family has taken in 1.8 billion in cash and gifts.)

This outright looting has certainly not been accompanied by any moves benefitting the American people. It’s a shame that the length of Trump’s meandering, bloated and mendacious State of the Union speech kept so many people from seeing or hearing the Democratic rebuttal presented by Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger–as a recent post from the Contrarian reported, it was a concise and effective 13 minutes.

Spanberger began with three simple questions: Is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family?Is the president working to keep Americans safe — both at home and abroad? Is the President working for YOU? She proceeded to point out that Trump’s reckless trade policies have cost American families an average of $1,700 each. (Despite Trump’s insistence that tariffs are paid by foreign countries, they aren’t–as every economist, liberal or conservative, has pointed out, they are a tax on Americans, intended to offset the revenues lost thanks to the deep tax cuts for the wealthy.)  

Spanberger also highlighted the escalating closures of rural health clinics, thanks to provisions in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” 

And tonight, the President celebrated this law — the one threatening rural hospitals, stripping healthcare from millions of Americans, and driving up costs in energy and housing. All while cutting food programs for hungry kids.

Spanberger–who was an intelligence officer with the CIA before entering politics–then turned to the question of public safety, pointing out that ICE’s time spent sowing fear is time “not spent investigating murders, crimes against children, or the criminals defrauding seniors of their life savings.” Worse still, Trump has destroyed America’s reputation as a force for good in the world–outcomes she attributed to the appointment of “deeply unserious people to our nation’s most serious positions.”

Turning to the third of her questions, Spanberger ticked off the multiple grifts of an administration that she quite accurately accused of being the most corrupt in memory. Not only is Trump enriching himself, his family, and his friends at a scale that is unprecedented–“cozying up to foreign princes for airplanes and billionaires for ballrooms”–there’s the ongoing cover-up of the Epstein files, the crypto scams, and the embarrassing plastering of his name and face on buildings all over our nation’s capital.

Spanberger ended her thirteen minutes by reminding her listeners that We the People have the power to stop the desecration of the American Idea. We have the power–and the obligation–to put an end to what is truly a massive theft, not just of our funds, but of America’s founding philosophy.

As she concluded,

George Washington warned us about the possibility of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” rising to power. But he also encouraged us — all Americans — to unite in “a common cause” to move this nation forward.

That is our charge once more. And that is what we are seeing across the country.

It is deeply American and patriotic to do so, and it is how we ensure that the State of our Union remains strong, not just this year but for the next 250 years as well.

If we’ve learned anything from the slow drip of the Epstein files, it is that a class of wealthy and entitled individuals consider themselves above the laws that govern us “little people.” That sense of impunity has now led to unprecedented corruption and the wholesale looting of dollars meant to provide for the public good.

“It’s time for a change” has never been a more powerful slogan.

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Rights Aren’t Just For People We LIke

One of the pithier explanations of the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment was written by Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in a case titled United States v. Schwimmer. In that opinion, Holmes wrote that “if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”

Holmes was acknowledging the obvious: majorities don’t seek to censor popular opinions. They seek to suppress the “ideas we hate,” the beliefs and utterances that they find offensive.

That lesson–that rights are universal, and not reserved for people with whom we agree or people we consider part of our “tribes”–was one of the most difficult for my undergraduate students to learn. Surely the government can sanction people we know are lying! Surely the City Council can pass ordinances against material we consider smut! Surely religious liberty doesn’t mean that atheists and Satanists have the same rights as good Christians!

That pesky principle–that rights also apply to disfavored folks–was the subject of a recent article in the Washington Post,describing yet another aspect of Trump’s inability to grasp that simple concept, or the fact that people he hates (and boy, there are a lot of them!) are entitled to equal treatment under the law.

This particular evidence of Trump’s ignorance involved the pardon power.

As Biden prepared to leave the presidency, he had used that power to commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal prisoners awaiting execution. He didn’t free them; the commutation meant that they will serve life in prison. The article reports that Trump “was outraged at this decision and set out to roll it back.”

Ironically, if Biden had pardoned the murderers altogether or had them released (which would have been constitutionally possible but politically scandalous), Trump couldn’t have done anything about it. But because they remain under life sentences, his administration can still influence their fates. It can’t lawfully kill them, but it can dictate the conditions of their confinement.

Our vicious President issued an executive order on his very first day back in office, declaring his intent to “ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes.” The Justice Department that he has turned into a weapon he controls proceeded to implement the directive by sending those prisoners to the most isolating imprisonment possible — “a ‘supermax’ facility that cuts inmates off from most human contact.”

A number of the affected prisoners brought suit.  U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee in the District of Columbia, ruled that the transfer violated the Constitution’s guarantee of due process, at least in their cases.

As the article points out, It’s a decision that “cuts to the heart of the rule of law.”

Kelly’s opinion is on appeal, and given the unprecedented leeway granted to Trump by the Supreme Court, there’s no telling what the final outcome will be. But as the article points out, Trump’s effort to undo Biden’s clemency is a warning about Trump’s own flagrant misuse of the pardon power, including the threat that it might encourage future presidential successors to “reach for more boundary-pushing ways to get around past pardons.”

Trump has been nothing but “boundary-pushing.” Most pundits attribute that boundary-pushing–more properly labeled illegality–to Trump’s overwhelming desire for power, to the self-aggrandizement that he has displayed throughout his life. That explanation, however, assumes a degree of “knowingness”–a deliberate decision to ignore restraints that he doesn’t believe should apply to him.

I think that’s wrong.

If We the People have learned anything about this sad excuse for a human being, it is that he isn’t just mentally ill, isn’t just slipping into a senility that is getting harder and harder to ignore. He is also profoundly ignorant. He has consistently manifested a lack of understanding of–or even a basic familiarity with– the Constitution he took an oath to defend. He is quite clearly incapable of understanding the quote by Holmes with which I began this post, and if he did understand it, he would reject it.

What We the People have come to understand is the immense–and in many cases, irreversible– damage that can be done to a nation when it elevates a profoundly flawed, incompetent and thoroughly vicious man-child to a position of power.

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A Wellness It Isn’t

We all experience repeated echoes from our childhoods, and some of those echoes are apt for our time. If my grandmother were still alive, for example, I can picture her reacting to the ongoing damage being done by RNK, Jr. and the rest of Trump’s clown car by shaking her head and saying “a wellness it isn’t.”

She would be so right. Some recent confirmation:

On CBS’ Sunday Morning, the network’s chief medical correspondent had a lengthy interview with David Oshinsky, author of “Polio: An American Story.” He also interviewed violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman, who contracted polio as a child. The segment can be found on YouTube, and is worth watching if you missed it. It included heartbreaking pictures of hundreds of children in iron lungs, and showed the long lines of children waiting for shots with their grateful parents when a vaccine became available. While we contemporary folks like to think that polio has been entirely eradicated, it is still crippling people elsewhere on the globe–and experts warn that RNK, Jr.’s anti-vaccine campaign–a campaign that has consumed too many parents in the U.S.– threatens to invite that dread disease back.

The New York Times tells us that Kennedy’s insane war on effective, life-saving vaccines is curtailing research into these vital protections. The consequences of his war on science, medicine and public health expertise are being felt throughout the industry. Investors are described as “hesitant to bet on a field that has fallen out of favor in Washington,” and manufacturers are seeing declining sales. Pfizer’s chief executive has been quoted as saying that the anti-vaccine animus is “almost like a religion.” Asked what needs to change, he said, “the health secretary” characterizing Kennedy’s rhetoric as “anti-science.”

Indeed. As Lincoln Square recently noted, “certainty has sunk its teeth into his brain, like so many brainworms before it.” The article recounted Kennedy’s efforts to support stem cell treatments, which have not been medically vetted, are not FDA-approved and “have been shown to cause really, really adverse effects. Blindness. Death. Chronic pain.” But RFK, Jr. has “done some reading, found that lots of people say it’s great, and has concluded that the lack of FDA approval isn’t based on a dearth of evidence–he’s convinced that it’s part of the FDA’s war on non-traditional medical treatments.

Who needs pesky evidence?

Rolling Stone conducted an investigation into the growing number of ethical breaches at the CDC, including cases in which appointees allied with Kennedy have approved grant proposals that had not gone through a typical review process. And a complaint filed with the World Health Network details numerous violations of CDC guidelines in the agency’s revisions of recommendations for isolation. 

Corruption can take many forms; at HHS, that corruption appears to be an outgrowth of Kennedy’s obsessions–his evident belief that he knows better than doctors and scientists, and his willingness to rely upon “evidence” that confirms his prejudices while ignoring evidence that rebuts them. Trump’s corruption, on the other hand, is entirely transactional and open to bribery.

A recent example: one of Trump’s innumerable Executive Orders will boost domestic production of the weedkiller glyphosate. As the linked article from Reuters reports, the executive order “invoked the Defense Production Act to ensure the domestic supply of phosphorus and glyphosate, a widely used weedkiller at the center of tens of thousands of lawsuits by plaintiffs claiming it causes cancer.” Trump’s order came after Bayer, which acquired Monsanto and is the only U.S. company that produces glyphosate, proposed a $7.25 billion legal settlement to address tens of thousands of lawsuits claiming its glyphosate weedkiller Roundup causes cancer. In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” citing evidence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in studies of exposed workers.

The Executive Order also purports to provide “immunity” for makers of the herbicides. That immunity undoubtedly made the folks at Bayer very happy, and we can only wonder what Bayer promised Trump to persuade him to issue the order, which has infuriated the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” movement. (Even RNK,Jr. doesn’t defend Roundup…)

It’s all part of this administration’s corrupt war on science and evidence, and its willingness to sell its laws and regulations to the “highest bidder”–the corporate fat-cats and others willing to “bend the knee” and “comply in advance” with the destruction of democracy and the rule of law.

A wellness it isn’t.

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