Ideas and Impressions: Trump will stop at nothing to win

Jason Moscovitz

By Jason Moscovitz

While the world watched the impeachment trial of U.S. President Donald J. Trump, you had to wonder if Mad magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman had it right when he’d say, through that sizable gap in his front teeth, “What, me worry?”

I can imagine Trump’s face on Mad having the same impact as Alfred E. Neuman. The look is the same. A satirical idiot is still an idiot and, guess what, Trump has graced the front cover of recent editions of Mad. Actually I had no idea Mad was still around until I Googled it.

How could baby boomers know one day that someone just like Alfred E. Neuman would be occupying the Oval Office? For me, that’s the tragedy. I grew up never believing it possible that such a flawed individual would be the most powerful person in the world.

There are those who like Trump’s “America first” politics, his support of Israel, and there is no denying how employment and American stock exchange numbers have improved since he became president. But, as Shakespeare wrote, it still smells “rotten in the state of Denmark,” no matter how you cut it.

Trump’s behaviour led to the impeachment process – even though the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate would never vote to remove Trump from office. While Democrats argued impeachment was about protecting the constitution, Republicans maintained it was about protecting the presidency from unhinged partisanship, and so went the straight-laced politics.

While experts and pollsters will sway back and forth on who won the impeachment bunfight, the impeachment cannons on both sides are loaded and ready to fire with the primaries, the nominating conventions, and the presidential election now just days, weeks and months away.

The key question for many is whether Trump can win again. For many outsiders around the world, like us looking in, it is hard to imagine Trump winning again. However, hold on, anything is possible in America.

The Democratic candidates for president who are still standing represent a political party in disarray as the Democrats seem to sorely lack the necessary policy cohesion and discipline to move forward. The candidates offering to go to war against Trump in November appear weak, or at least, no one has yet been able to stand up and lead from a position of strength.

I’ve nothing against old people – I’m one of them – but former vice-president Joe Biden is past his best-before date. Senator Elizabeth Warren may have had it, but then blew it when she couldn’t gravitate to the centre. Mayor Pete Buttigieg is an intelligent, interesting newcomer, but the question remains, is a gay president even possible in today’s United States of America? Senator Bernie Sanders is further left than Warren. Senator Amy Klobuchar shines in that crowd, but can she shine throughout the country in sufficient numbers to win the presidency?

Democratic Party candidates are just not impressive and it makes you wonder how Hillary Clinton must feel about that. What a story it would be, if, because they couldn’t do better, Democrats drafted Hillary Clinton or dragged her into another battle with the same Trump she was once friends with until he savagely nicknamed her “Crooked Hillary” and then went on to beat her in the states that counted the most in the 2016 election.

What a rematch that would be, another battle of titans Trump and Clinton. It would be electrifying entertainment, but it would also do something positive and concrete. Somehow it would be good to know if Trump was a fluke in 2016 because a whole bunch of bad things happened to poor Clinton – when bad luck, bad judgement, and a bad campaign cost her the presidency.

Trump beat her in the Electoral College. He did it by belittling his opponent. When Trump threw dirt all over Clinton, he proved how far his killer instinct could bring him in politics. History will remember that Trump bullied his way to the presidency in 2016.

Post-impeachment, Trump appears to be ready to bully some other Democrat this year. We now know this man, this president, stops at nothing. There is a scary side to Trump that goes beyond him.

And what is actually scarier than Trump are the thousands of crazed, angry Americans who egg him on at his rallies.

From the Editor: The news is now stranger than fiction

Michael Regenstreif, Editor

By Michael Regenstreif

Editor

My column in our August 19 issue discussed the explicitly racist attacks of U.S. President Donald Trump on four rookie members of the U.S. House of Representatives, all of whom are women of colour. In the days and weeks after that issue went to press, there have been some downright bizarre developments to the story.

Two of the congresswomen, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who both support the anti-Israel BDS movement, were scheduled to visit East Jerusalem and the West Bank in August. In July, despite a law allowing Israel to bar BDS supporters from entering the country, Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States (who is known to be extremely close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), announced, “Out of respect for the U.S. Congress, and the great alliance between Israel and America, we would not deny entry to any member of Congress into Israel.”

That changed on August 15 when Trump tweeted, “It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib to visit. They hate Israel & all Jewish people, & there is nothing that can be said or done to change their minds.”

Immediately following Trump’s tweet, Israel announced that Omar and Tlaib would not be allowed to visit after all. Although Netanyahu and his ministers claimed the change had nothing to do with Trump’s tweet, few analysts believed that.

The decision was immediately condemned by mainstream American Jewish organizations including AIPAC, Jewish Federations of North America, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Israel Policy Forum, and J Street as contradicting democratic values.

Barring Omar and Tlaib may well have provided more PR value to the BDS movement than the visit itself would have.

Then the story got even weirder. On August 20, Trump proclaimed, “I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat; I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” (According to the Pew Research Center, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton received 71 per cent of the Jewish vote in 2016, compared to 24 per cent for Republican candidate Trump. In the 2018 midterm elections, after two years of the Trump administration, 79 per cent of the Jewish vote went to Democratic candidates, compared to just 17 per cent for Republicans.)

Trump invoked the antisemitic trope about the loyalty of Jews – one of the most common expressions of antisemitism throughout history. In the following days, Trump doubled-down and tripled-down on the trope elaborating that Jewish Democratic voters (in other words, Jews who don’t support Trump) are disloyal to the Jewish people and to Israel.

“In my opinion, if you vote for a Democrat you’re being very disloyal to Jewish people, and you’re being very disloyal to Israel. And only weak people would say anything other than that,” he declared on the White House lawn.

And in a tweet, Trump quoted and thanked talk radio conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root for his “very nice words”: “President Trump is the greatest President for Jews and for Israel in the history of the world, not just America, he is the best President for Israel in the history of the world and the Jewish people in Israel love him like he’s the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God.”

The nightly news – in these Trumpian times – is, indeed, stranger than fiction.

Thanks Stephanie

As Stephanie Shefrin notes in her column, she is stepping back from being a regular contributor to Modern Mishpocha, the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin parenting column she created six years ago. Stephanie’s insights and discussions of various family and parenting issues have made her columns compelling reading for parents, grandparents and others.

One of Stephanie’s innovations was to recruit other contributors to the column and we’ll continue to publish Modern Mishpocha columns from Jen Perzow and Shirlee Press. In the coming months, we’ll also introduce a couple of new contributors Stephanie has recruited.

Thanks, Stephanie, for making discussions about modern mishpochas a vital part of the Bulletin. I know I speak for many when I say we’ll look forward to any not-regularly-scheduled Modern Mishpocha columns you’ll contribute in the future when inspiration demands and time allows.