In the nearly five months since Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on Oct. 7, igniting the most divisive foreign policy crisis of the Biden presidency, Donald J. Trump has said noticeably little about the subject.But the Times reports make the same mistake many smart, well-informed people make when assessing this profoundly stupid, poorly informed man: They try to fit him into a politcal-science category.
He criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, before quickly retreating to more standard expressions of support for the country. And he has made blustery claims that the invasion never would have happened had he been president.
But his overall approach has been laissez-faire.That's not quite right.
... Mr. Trump’s hands-off approach to the bloody Middle East conflict reflects the profound anti-interventionist shift he has brought about in the Republican Party over the past eight years....
Trump knows his voter base includes both pro-Israel religious rightists and neo-fascist anti-Semites who complain about "globalism." Trump doesn't want to offend Evangelicals, but undoubtedly he's also being advised by the anti-Semitic Steve Bannon and others not to show too much support for a "globalist war." (Feel free to mentally put triple parentheses around the word "globalist.")
As the Times story notes, he's had friction with Benjamin Netanyahu, though he's also not a huge fan of Muslims -- he's promised a Muslim ban that's "even bigger than before" in his second term. However, he does seem to like his family's Saudi patrons (and the Saudis want a two-state solution).
So it's complicated for him, and therefore he's probably been advised to say nothing. Instead, he says he's strong where Biden is weak, and therefore he'll magically scare every country in the world so much that no one will dare to fight a war when he's president, and he's also such a great dealmaker that he'll instantly end all the wars that already exist. And millions of voters think that's plausible, because they saw him being a strong, tough dealmaker four fourteen seasons on TV.
The fact that Trump has persuaded millions of Americans that he's smarter than people who are actually well informed is one of his great weapons as a politcal scam artist. It means he never has to master geopolitical complexities -- he just tells us that his dealmaking superpowers would be compromised if he went public with his plans to neutralize conflicts, and that's all his fervent and potential fans seem to require. It's pure bunkum, but it's part of an approach that won him one election and nearly won him a second, so he'll just keep doing it.
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