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| US Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman (Jerusalem Post) |
And yet that is exactly what I recently didand continue to do – difficult though that may be. (Although as I also recently said - I am equally convinced that there are many people that will deny that any of things Trump does are good. They will defend that perception but in my view it is just blind hatred generated in part by politics.)
Recent stories reported in the media sum it all up for me. A story in the Jerusalem Post has highlighted what is good about Trump with respect to Israel and the Jewish people. The US Ambassador to Israel notes that the President has slayed some sacred cows. Deservedly so, in my book. He cites 3 examples.
The first example is that US is about to cut funding for UNRWA. This agency was created by the UN in 1949 for purposes of humanitarian aid for Palestinian refugees. While on the surface cutting aid might seem cruel. One has to consider where much of that the money went. It was used to pay the families of terrorists killed while attacking Israel. It is not pretyy well estblished by the Palestinian Authority that if someone chooses to blow themselves up in service to killing Jews their family will be compensated. The US should not be providing funds for that, no matter how humanitarian UNRWA is supposed to be.
What about the majority of Palestinians that aren’t terrorists and could really use the help? One should ask PA president Mahmoud Abbas about that. He is the one directing where the money should go. If it weren’t used to pay terrorist’s families for their son’s ‘service’ to the cause, those poor refuges would continue to get even more US aid through UNRWA. Instead they will get nothing from the US.
(Not to worry. Leave it a European nation (the UK) to fill the void. Why would a country that holds dear an antisemite like Corbyn care if terrorists families are rewarded for killing Jews?)
Another Trump accomplishment Friedman noted was tearing up that horrible nuclear deal with Iran. All that talk about Iran going nuclear again has not come to pass. What has instead happened is that pulling out if that deal precipitated the worst financial crisis in Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. No one there is talking about building the bomb. They are talking about survival. As the NewYork Times reports:
Iran’s rial fell to a record low on Wednesday, part of a staggering drop in the currency’s value since the United States pulled out of the nuclear deal only four months ago.
Those who went to work at the start of the Iranian week on Saturday saw their money shed a quarter of its value by the time they left the office on Wednesday. Signs of the currency chaos can be seen everywhere in Tehran: Worried residents lined up outside beleaguered money changers, travel agents offered vacation prices only in hard currency, and diapers disappeared from store shelves.
A third thing mentioned by Friedman was Trump’s recognition of Jeruslam as the capital of Israel. The fear that it would stoke additional violence never materialized. Instead Jerusalem is now recognized officially by the United States for something it has been since the founding of the modern state back in 1949: Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Israel. There is no going back. I don't see the US reversing that decision in the future even under a Democratic President. Once it is is done - it is done. To put it the way Friedman did:
“Now, the United States did not make Jerusalem the capital of Israel. That was done by King David some 3,000 years ago under God’s direction,” he said. “But, I hope you will agree with me that it feels awfully good that for the first time in 2,000 years since churban bayit sheni – the destruction of the Second Temple – the most powerful and moral nation on earth has made this important recognition of the primacy of Jerusalem to the State of Israel and the Jewish People. “So, baruch Hashem (thank God), it was a good year in many respects,” he said.
How wonderful it is to hear those words from a US Amabasador to Israel. I don’t believe any past ambassador has said anything close to those words. Such a pleasure to hear.
As far as what else Trump has done, let us not forget his appointment of Nikky Haley as US Ambassador to the UN. I don’t think we will ever get anyone better than that.
This is what makes it so difficult for me to condmen the President. But how can I not considering the flow of events that paint one of the ugliest pictures of an American President in US history (At least in my lifetime.) Two events that occurred in rapid succession pile on to the stories already told by others who either worked in the White House or had free access to it.
One might recall Michael Wolff's takedown of the President in his book, Fire and Fury. That was followed by Omarosa Manigault Newman’s expsose’ calling Trump a racist and reporting that there were people high up in the administration that were secretly working against some of what he wanted to do. Then a few days ago, there was Bob Woodward’s book, Fury, detailing the actual opinions of so much of Trumps staff – including some of his most important cabinet members. From The Atlantic:
Woodward delivers a raft of jaw-dropping anecdotes about the administration: Secretary of Defense James Mattis saying the president has the comprehension of “a fifth- or sixth-grader.” Chief of Staff John Kelly calling Trump an idiot. Trump saying Attorney General Jeff Sessions “is mentally retarded.” The economic adviser Gary Cohn orchestrating the theft of a letter from the president’s desk to prevent him from signing it.
And as if that weren’t enough, the following day there was an anonymous oped in the New York Times that was perhaps the most damning of all. Here in large part what it said:
We want the (Trump) administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.
But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.
That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.
The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making…
In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic…
From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.
Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier...
Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.
The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.
I wish I could say that I am shocked by all of this. But I’m not. It is not too hard to see all of this happening right before our eyes – and the eyes of the world. On an almost daily basis. But when an insider picked by the President has these same observations from the inside - there can be little doubt that ‘what you see is what you get’ with this President. There is no way in the world that Donald J. Trump is good for this country without the help of those insiders that work against his uninformed, amoral, impulsive, and erratic nature.
That’s the conundrum. There is no way I can support a President whose behavior has been described in such terrible terms by so many different sources. These are no his enemies. Or the media. Some of those sources that he handpicked to serve him. And even support many of his polices as being good for the country. As I do.
Just to be clear, I obviously do not know the President. I have never met him. And there are some great stories prior to becoming the President about his behavior that seem to be the antithesis of what it is now. One of them a personal experience mentioned by Ambassador Friedman. But his behavior in office has yet to show any of that.
In my view, there is no possible way that anyone with an ounce of common decency can support a man like this to be the Commander in Chief and the leader of the free world. No matter how much we like some - or even all - of his polices. Thank God there are insiders like the author of that anonymous New York Times oped writer that do what they can to “preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office”. Without that, who knows what the world would look like.