M.I.G.A. in the woodpile

The year is 2028. Trump is now 6’4″, according to his doctor. He has survived more assassination attempts than the other presidents combined. He’s managed to avoid impeachment by way of a backroom deal with the Democrats that granted citizenship to a million Dreamers. Trump says he’s days away from a deal with Putin to end the Ukraine war, just in time to give JD Vance a boost in the polls, but by now only a sprinkling of Evangelicals and diehards remain from his original grassroots base.

What a difference a few years can make. As Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Candace Owens wash their hands of this administration, the company that the president keeps leaves little mystery as to where things go from here. These days the president prefers to bathe in the sweet and soggy praise of those who were against him when he first ran for office: Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro and Lindsey Graham. As strange as it is to say, Trump has become a Never-Trumper.

Back in 2015, I wrote the semi-satirical piece Why Donald Trump Should have held a Miss Universe pageant in Iran. Before the Islamic Revolution of 1978 Iran actually used to host beauty pageants, but the broader point was that commerce and cultural exchange often succeed in relaxing political barriers. The article was initially rejected for being too negative about Trump’s personal baggage at a time when he was the next big hope, but indeed many of the early warning signs were there that in the slipstream of this populist Pegasus was a neocon Trojan horse. Trump was already a huge war hawk on Iran and an advocate of massive military spending. His extensive business and familial ties in New York were completely intertwined with Jews, including in-laws and grandchildren. So while some red meat was thrown into the mix in the form of anti-immigrant nativism, the overall manifestation of the two Trump administrations hardly diverges from its headwaters. These days, Trump rarely utters the slogan America First – perhaps a Freudian pink slip of termination – but what you will hear coming out of the woodwork from a growing number of defectors is the Make Israel Great Again lampoon. Let’s assess the claim.

Over the Trump era, we’ve seen the embassy moved to Jerusalem, recognition of Golan’s annexation and the conclusion of Gaza’s demolition. The 1.9 million refugees slowly being redistributed to neighboring countries could also end up in a neighborhood near you. The ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, is an open supporter of the Greater Israel Project (and he is the Christian in Trump’s cabinet). Appetites for a chunk of the fallen Syrian state persist as rumors for now, while Israel has invaded Lebanon up to the Litani River and may well convert this “defensive buffer” into eventual annexation. The fighting is so fierce that one IDF soldier was forced to use a sledgehammer to defend himself against a statue of Jesus.

On the socioeconomic front, inflation in Israel is a mere 1.9%, compared to 3.5% in the United States and up to 6% in some EU countries. New Jewish immigrants continue to arrive in Israel and the country even ranked eighth in the recent World Happiness Report – remarkable in the midst of intermittent war. Israelis are a special breed, not only do they repeatedly choose Benjamin Netanyahu to lead them but also Knesset ogres like Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose recent role in the bringing about Palestinian death penalty law was celebrated by his wife baking a birthday cake with the image of a noose and the words “Sometimes dreams come true.”

Out in the Diaspora, the morale of Jewish activists might not be quite so plucky but it nevertheless endures with aggressive litigation of everything deemed antisemitic. Australia recently completed an inquisition following the Bondi attack by two Muslims, with the expected fallout that free speech and gun rights will be further stymied. It’s unlikely there’ll be many more influential youth leaders who dare take a stand on Israel the way Charlie Kirk did before he was wiped off the map. There’s a saying among political pundits that nothing is true until Benjamin Netanyahu denies it, and sure enough the Israeli PM embarked on a strangely prolific campaign to deny Israeli involvement in the Kirk assassination.

A similar run of good luck with plausible deniability has carried the Jeffrey Epstein affair to an anticlimactic stalemate, even if it’s widely assumed he must have been running a blackmail operation on behalf of the Israelis. No indictments, no justice for victims and not even a minor scandal about the use of Jewish supremacist language in the emails. Instead of a Goyim Lives Matter awakening, Americans were treated to this hysterical exchange in the congressional hearing in which antisemitism became the focal point. Who knows what will be written about the Protocols of the Elders of Epstein a century from now? I say that because the passage of time invariably gives Jewish narratives the benefit of the doubt.

Last week in Brussels, stained glass windows more than a century old were removed from the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula because they were said to be antisemitic depictions of a blood-libel from 1370. Not knowing precisely what happened seven centuries ago might be one reason to remove the murals, but what the clergy have agreed to do is to kowtow with an apology plaque in place of the windows and grovel to the Jewish community for forgiveness. This is the direction that atonement and reconciliation always travels in between these groups. The Middle Ages may have been a time of rampant superstition and religious mania, however I see no reason why such zealotry would have been confined to Christians while Jews be considered paragons of equanimity not at all prone to neurotic curiosities and conspiracy.

The lifetime work of Ariel Toaff is a good place to start for the alternative perspective, as the Israeli-based professor of medieval history proved through meticulous research that European Jews were involved in ritualistic blood sacrifice beyond the garden variety of kabbalah. The modern State of Israel hardly inspires more confidence given some of the civic ordinances that transpire, quite contrary to its reputed secularism. Footage from recent protests in Israel caught my eye for I had never noticed that the country’s ambulances were marked with a red hexagram instead of a Red Cross. Thus the Israelis have done what Muslims have done with the Red Crescent, even though the humanitarian movement of the Red Cross has nothing to do with religion (the logo is an inversion of neutral Switzerland’s flag). At any rate, the Rothschild family sign has come full circle in modern Israel, but it hasn’t stopped the pathological aversion to anything that looks like a cross. The education system in Israel has gone to the extreme of banning the international plus sign because it resembles the crucifix. In its place, the up tack (﬩) was implemented to placate all of the “pious” Jews – for whom spitting on crosses is a 1,800-year-old tradition.

The other week at a protest in northern Israel police confiscated a Hungarian flag from an anti-Netanyahu demonstrator on the grounds that it looked too similar to the Palestinian flag! Poor Viktor Orban just can’t catch a break these past few weeks. The sole democracy in the Middle East they keep telling us, but such are the level of frivolous sensitivity, irritability and institutionalized chutzpah. Last month an Israeli lawyer and politician serving in the Knesset called for the billions in aid that Israel receives from America to no longer be called aid but rather a “security exchange” and “one of the most cost-effective strategic investments” – especially given the “coordination in confronting Iran.” As with the historical understandings that Western leaders reach with Jewish counterparts, the financial ones seem a lot like Heads: Jews win, Tails: Gentiles lose – with Trump’s visage on upcoming US coinage to supervise the formality. This rather cynical dialectic reminds me of a famous quote from Israeli PM Menachem Begin in which he said “I wish both sides good luck” just as the brutal Iran-Iraq war was beginning. If you like dark humor then wait until you find out that Begin was award the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978, in spite of being responsible for the King David Hotel bombing that killed 91 people.

This sounds a lot like the trajectory that Trump is on, pining for shiny accolades while being responsible for grievous crimes. Trump and Netanyahu – two chickpeas in a falafel – have managed to revolt even traditional allies like the servile European ones. Furthermore, Israeli daily Haaretz reports that a critical mass of Jews in America is now disgusted with Israel, although this is a motif we’ve heard before and deserves suspicion. Performative outrage is a staple of the political left, which is the tribe of most American Jews, and so when Israel periodically “mows the lawn” in Palestine the expected outrage is largely performative and temporary, for in the interim period they typically drift back into the fold, recycle their final straw and allow the cycle to repeat. Figures like Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer are clearly reluctant critics of Israel, while most Jewish anti-Zionist media are to some extent controlled opposition. One need only look at the editorial staff of the formerly communist now anti-Zionist publication Jewish Currents, which includes born and bred Zionist apostate Arielle Angel and Israel damage-control operative Peter Beinart. In 2021 the publication apologized after being called out for running ads for a “leadership” training program in Israel.

Beinart is the archetypal Jewish activist who advances Jewish interests through the politically correct framework, and is therefore legion with the bipartisan chorus of those still denying Israeli designs and impetus behind the latest war in the Middle East. Too late it seems, as plenty of American normies have crossed the Noticing™ Rubicon, but just to make it official, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had his blond moment (just as his Spanish surname connotes) and inadvertently revealed that Israel forced America’s hand.

Unsurprisingly, social media in recent weeks has been awash with sobering testimonials from Americans of all walks of life who have finally realized that their team has actually been the bad guys all along. Those in active duty appear to have come to the same conclusion, because two incidents of fires on US Navy carriers suggest sabotage from war-shy personnel. It’s been a real treat to watch average Americans call to account not just the Levins and Shapiros, but all of the Shabbos goyim on the AIPAC payroll – folks like Mike Johnson, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton and Rick Scott. Meanwhile the popularity of Thomas Massie is skyrocketing.

The fault lines of the second Trump administration are now well and truly entrenched and regrettably he has chosen all that glistens – from the gaudy opulence of his material accumulation to the sparkling words of his sycophantic counsel. He at least has the self-awareness to admit that he’s “not heaven bound.” You could almost begin to feel for Elon Musk, who got a raw deal on the EV mandate while the rest of Trump’s inner circle enriches itself beyond all shame. Even Baron Trump now has an estimated net worth of $150 million. Not bad for someone too young to vote, but with that kind of money he can start buying politicians. Joining the fray is sleazebag lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who joined the Republican Party last month, while nutcase Laura Loomer solidifies her face in Trump’s good books. Jews really have a way of getting their foot in the door – readers may recall that Loomer was a speaker at the 2022 American Renaissance Conference, meanwhile luminaries of academia like Kevin MacDonald and Tom Sunic still await an invitation. It would probably take a constellation of experts to understand the totality of Trump’s psychology and physiology; the multiple personalities between campaigner and president, the junk food eater who never sleeps and the teetotaler who is drunk on power.

If Trump is being blackmailed into waging war on Iran then the obvious question is why such blackmail wasn’t active during his relatively pacifistic first term as president. That would be giving him too much credit, and credit is something he can’t get enough. Americans are paying for this spectacular misadventure through a variety of camouflaged ways, meanwhile Trump has the sensibility to mock inflation, Jesus, Tucker Carlson’s IQ and Candace Owens’ looks. It’s still a mystery how he manages to pivot from childish tweets on social media to 90-minute phone calls with the Russian president, the content of which remains highly secretive. It must humor Putin to have Trump’s laconically named social media platform Truth Social translated into Russian, since that’s more or less how the old Soviet newspaper Pravda was named.

There’s a well-known aphorism in diplomacy that says if you aren’t at the table then you are on the menu. That doesn’t bode well for Ukraine, which is now solely reliant on an energy-starved Europe. Zelensky, who is involved “up to his neck” in money-laundering according to a former Ukrainian diplomat and prosecutor, keeps registering his interest for nuclear weapons. Lousy timing indeed, following the recent advancement of the so-called Doomsday clock to a record 85 seconds to midnight. In an era of erratic, contemptuous and nihilistic Western rule we may ask whether the bothersome convention of daylight savings adjustments actually serves a wise purpose: confusing the timekeepers of our Armageddon. Whether Trump is the cuckoo or just the cuckservative of this late hour, I leave readers to decide.