Time magazine has named Volodymyr Zelensky its Person of the Year. If the magazine also picked a Loser of the Year, that would hands down go to the man who tried to blackmail the Ukrainian president into digging up dirt on President Joe Biden and wound up getting impeached.
Donald Trump won the more complimentary honor in 2016 and thought he should have it in perpetuity, so he had fake reproductions made to hang on his walls.
Adding to Trump’s latest grievances – the list is endless – is that he was beaten out for the Time honor by a leader who became an international hero by humiliating the former president’s trusted friend President Vladimir Putin.
John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, mocked his former boss’s boast that if he were still president, he would have prevented the war in Ukraine. That’s right, Bolton said, because Trump would not have stood in Putin’s way if Russia had invaded, as Zelensky and Biden did.
It must have grated on Trump that Zelensky is a Jew, like the men he vilified for leading his impeachment, Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler. He singled out the two Democratic congressmen, chairs of the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, respectively, for his prosecution. He especially targeted Schiff, who he called shifty, an old antisemitic canard. Trump has left a long trail of antisemitic excrement and it recently has become more odiferous.
He has stepped up his accusation of Jewish disloyalty to him, to this country and to Israel. After all he has done for Israel, three-quarters of the Jews had the temerity to vote against him. And if he is the Republican nominee in 2024, even more will do so after his public dinner with two prominent members of the Adolph Hitler fan club.
Trump’s guests were rap singer Kanye West (a.k.a. Ye) and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. He couldn’t have been too uncomfortable with his two guests or their views since he didn’t throw them out.
In a recent book about his administration, Trump is quoted telling his former chief of staff, John Kelly, “Hitler did a lot of good things” and he wished his own generals were as loyal to him as Der Fuhrer’s were to him. Some actually tried to assassinate him. Vanity Fair reported one of his former wives said he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside.
After news of the meeting went public, Trump denied he’d ever heard of Fuentes, like he falsely denied knowing KKK leader David Duke, who endorsed Trump twice.
There was no real blowback from Republican politicians. Of course, they all swore they opposed antisemitism but strangely couldn’t bring themselves to utter the name of their party leader who’d been attacking the loyalty of American Jews and hosting prominent antisemites. It was party uber allies.
The Republican Jewish Coalition’s indulgence of Trump’s antisemitism reminds one that as in its name, it puts Republican and apparently, today’s white-supremacist, antisemitic, xenophobic version of the GOP – ahead of Jewish.
Trump’s own special envoy to combat antisemitism, Elan Carr, denounced cavorting with men like Fuentes, who has said, “I piss on your Talmud. Jews get the f**k out of America.” Carr said, “To placate antisemitism is to promote antisemitism.”
Only when pushed by public outcry, Trump found the right words to condemn Jew hatred, oblivious to his own role in normalizing it. And aides quickly looked for a meeting with some Jews he could be sure wouldn’t boo him.
It couldn’t be easy to find a Jewish audience that hadn’t condemned his public dinner with Hitler admirers; even the far-right Zionist Organization of America was upset. But not the haredi Orthodox education group at the President’s Conference of Torah Umesorah, which was meeting at his National Doral golf club in Miami.
“I’m the Jewish people’s best-ever ally” he said for the umpteenth time. Then he warned his audience about the true enemy. The Congress has become almost anti-Israel because some Democrats hate Israel with a passion.
IN AN apparent senior moment, the 76-year-old disgraced former president forgot to mention that he’d publicly dined with two of Hitler’s admirers (of which he may be another). Instead, he reminded them that he had commuted the sentence of a kosher slaughterhouse exec convicted of bank fraud and money laundering. That got a standing ovation. He repeated lines from old speeches calling antisemitism a vile poison and said, “we must confront those who spread its venomous creed.” If anyone noticed the irony, they didn’t mention it.
This week, the US House Select Committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol Building recommended the Department of Justice prosecute the former president for insurrection and other crimes.
It caps a run of bad, unfaked, news. His announcement that he was running for president again got a lot more yawns and groans than cheers. There were no big-name endorsements and two notable un-endorsements: his favorite daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, opted out.
The number of Republicans who want him to run again is steadily dropping, polls have shown. One by USA Today-Suffolk University revealed Republicans and Republican-leaning voters prefer Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over Trump by a 56-33 margin.
Enhancing Trump’s status as a loser, a label he abhors and slaps on others, has been a string of setbacks. Herschel Walker lost the Georgia Senate runoff and Trump was blamed; his eponymous company was convicted on all 17 counts of tax fraud and assorted financial crimes; the House Ways and Means Committee got his long-concealed tax returns; the Justice Department appointed a special counsel to lead criminal investigation; Georgia and New York are accelerating their criminal investigations; he called for the termination of parts of the Constitution; and his suit to block prosecutors from using the documents seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago failed.
The January 6 committee issued a comprehensive report that details its finding, evidence and recommendations that Trump and some key advisers be indicted on several federal criminal charges, including insurrection. It will become an immediate bestseller.
Trump quickly responded with bitter personal attacks on the committee members. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) is at the top along with “shifty” Schiff. Rep Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a constitutional scholar, oversaw the drafting of the charges and detailed them in the public hearing. Trump dismissed it with his usual charge of a witch hunt and his congressional loyalists will issue their own rebuttal.
Look for Jim Jordan (Ohio), who is expected to chair the Judiciary Committee, to hold hearings in the House next year to attack the investigation and the investigators. To get even they may even try to impeach Biden as soon as they can dream up charges.
The presumed incoming speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has said one of his first moves will be to strip Schiff of his seat on the Intelligence Committee. He has also promised to elevate two anti-Semites in his caucus, Paul Gosar of Arizona, whose own family has called him an anti-Semite, and Marjorie Taylor Green, who has trivialized the Holocaust and promotes Jewish conspiracies (Jewish space lasers starting California forest fires).
The party’s chief whip will be Rep Tom Emmer, who has accused a trio of Jewish billionaires – Mike Bloomberg, George Soros and Tom Steyer – of having bought control of Congress for the Democrats, The Hill reported.
As Trump’s political fortunes wane and his legal troubles mount, he will be looking for scapegoats and all those disloyal Jews will be attractive targets. And disturbingly, there are few signs all this political craziness and extremism has disillusioned his core supporters.
The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that has endorsed Trump as “the one man who actually represents our interests,” has posted its Prime Directive, which would appeal to its preferred candidate: Always blame the Jews for everything.
The writer is a Washington-based journalist, consultant, lobbyist and former AIPAC legislative director.