But Trump, with his infinite monkeys typing on infinite keyboards in his brain, landed on a set of words worthy of being a Splinter headline. “He’s right” is too strong a phrase to describe earth’s least principled mammal, but that Trump was able to pull this quote out of his resentment demonstrates a degree to which public perception of Israel has degraded.
Trump is a mirror of sorts. You can chart his posts at night alongside Fox News’ primetime lineup. He is a creature of the media as much as anyone in this country’s history (which is partly why the Beltway media loves him so much), and so the ideas that achieve escape velocity from his brain are something of a litmus test for whatever media Trump has absorbed. Most of it is what he sees on Fox News and CNN, but remember that this is a man who in his ideal world, would be writing reviews of Broadway plays for Vanity Fair and gossiping at elite Manhattan socialite gatherings about who he thinks is gay. He is in touch with culture outside of politics too, as the 2024 election proved.
Which is how a quote like this can escape his brain. He almost surely made it primarily because he personally loathes Benjamin Netanyahu. “Fuck him” he said after Netanyahu didn’t support his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and shortly after October 7th, Rolling Stone reported that Trump wanted Netanyahu impeached. It would not be inaccurate to suggest that Joe Biden had a higher opinion of Israel’s autocrat the last few years than Trump did. When doing Trump Kremlinology, personal petty grievances should always be at the top of your mind when constructing a theory. This is surely Trump trolling Benjamin Netanyahu, first and foremost.
But it’s still kind of mind-blowing that he used the word “kidnap.” Again, I must stress that I have been writing that maybe there’s a reason this is all so crazy since at least last summer, and no one should put too much weight in any Trump quote. Especially when he has caved again and again and again on his signature policy of imposing 19th century economics by brute force (although invading American cities may be his signature policy now). Those qualifiers said, I still think it’s notable that he used this phrasing, and it is a marker to the degree which Israel has lost the war for public opinion across the world.
The Israeli government has long acted as if they are bulletproof in Palestine, because they know the United States government will always support whatever crimes they do no matter what. There has been a longstanding policy practiced by presidents from Ronald Reagan to Dwight Eisenhower (but not Joe Biden) of using the built-in leverage the US has over its Middle East client state to rein them in when they are perpetuating a “holocaust” like Reagan once said about the bombing of Beirut, but actual punishment for Israel has never been in the cards. This has helped to fuel a broken and entitled Israeli society who largely cannot see the world through any other lens than their own grievance narrative, where many cannot understand why the world is recoiling at them in horror over their gleeful mass slaughter of children. Israel has clearly charted its path forward, and without unwavering American support, its future looks more like North Korea’s isolation on the global stage than one of a democratic country treated like an equal by the leaders of the free world (which to be clear, are in the European Union and Canada now).
This quote from Trump also reveals the staggering degree to which the Western press is isolated on this issue. If Trump’s cable news-addled brain can process that Israel boarding a boat in international waters and seizing its occupants is a form of kidnapping, but the Associated Press calls it a “diversion,” then that tells you how far behind the curve America’s political journalists are. Like Joe Biden and much of the elite American press, Trump supports Israel’s genocide, but he is far more honest about his desire to aid its ethnic cleansing campaign so he can build a casino in Gaza. Meanwhile, the New York Times and others let Benjamin Netanyahu write their headlines for them, then quietly change them when it reveals to be yet another lie, all while lecturing us about how important The Truth™ is.
This quote is a window into Trump’s political superpower, and how he weaponizes the political establishment’s lies and cynicism against it because he doesn’t feel the need to play their stupid games to try to give murderous ideas a fig leaf of legitimacy even if he agrees with them. The difference between Trump and the longstanding bipartisan agreement to give military contractors billions of dollars to build bombs dropped in Gaza, Yemen, Beirut and all over the world is one of degree, not kind. American voters’ ideology may be all over the place, but we have become very good at sniffing out a certain kind of Very Serious Beltway bullshit, and Trump has been the main beneficiary of the lies constantly emanating from America’s political elite.
Trump is what America’s apathy, corruption and institutional paralysis hath wrought. The only way to beat Trumpism is by being honest about America’s fundamentally broken, hypocritical and murderous status quo, and how voters have been clamoring for a big change from it since well before 2016. If Trump is saying things that are more honest about the state of the world than many Democratic and so-called “good” parts of America’s institutional elite can bring themselves to say, then we are far, far away from any kind of plan to stave off America’s collapse. Our democracy is crumbling in the face of Trump’s authoritarianism, but a big reason he has been able to take over in such an overwhelming manner is because the foundations he inherited were rotted to their core the first time he assumed office.
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