TRUMP TALKS ABOUT GAZA THE WAY HE TALKED ABOUT COVID

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Donald Trump on Thursday. What's getting the most attention is the fact that Trump wouldn't say, in response to two prompts by Hewitt, that he's "still standing 100% with Israel," as well as Trump's apparent impatience with the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. This impatience is being described as a rejection of Trump's previous pro-Likud posture -- but I think it also reflects Trump's own approach to big, protracted crises he can't figure out how to exploit successfully, which is that he just wishes they'd go away.

Trump doesn't care about human lives, Jewish or Palestinian. When he looks at Gaza, what he sees primarily a public relations problem for a fellow politician -- one that isn't going well for that politician. Read what Trump says in response to a question from Hewitt, and remember how Trump talked about the prolonged COVID crisis in 2020:

“And so are you still 100% with Israel? And what’s your advice to [Benjamin] Netanyahu beyond get it over with in a hurry?” ...

“Well, that’s all the advice you can give. I mean, that’s the advice. You’ve got to get it over with, and you have to get back to normalcy,” Trump said.

That's what Trump said repeatedly in 2020:

"Stay calm. It will go away. You know it — you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory." (March 30, 2020)

"And I think we’re doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it’s going to pass, and we’re going to be back to normal." (May 5, 2020)

In the Hewitt interview, Trump continued:

“And I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it, because you’ve got to have victory. You have to have a victory, and it’s taking a long time. And the other thing is I hate, they put out tapes all the time. Every night, they’re releasing tapes of a building falling down. They shouldn’t be releasing tapes like that. They’re doing, that’s why they’re losing the PR war. They, Israel is absolutely losing the PR war.”

Trump said videos of Gaza being destroyed only hurt Israel’s image around the world.

“They’re releasing the most heinous, most horrible tapes of buildings falling down. And people are imagining there’s a lot of people in those buildings, or people in those buildings, and they don’t like it. And I don’t know why they released, you know, wartime shots like that,” he said.

What Trump cares about is what people are shown. Recall that in early March of 2020, Trump didn't want the passengers of the cruise ship Grand Princess to be tested for COVID, even though quite a few clearly had it, because that would look bad for him:

"I like the numbers being where they are. I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault," Trump said in a Fox News interview.

And in June 2020, there was this:

President Donald Trump now says that he was not kidding when he told rallygoers over the weekend that he asked staff to slow down coronavirus testing, undercutting senior members of his own administration who said the comment was made in jest.

“I don’t kid, let me just tell you, let me make it clear,” Trump told a reporter on Monday, when asked again if he was kidding when he said Saturday he instructed his administration to slow down coronavirus testing.

The President then sought to highlight the US coronavirus testing numbers and asserted that “by having more tests, we have more cases.”

... Trump had told supporters at the rally that Covid-19 testing was “a double-edged sword.”

“I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down please,’ ” the President had said.

On the subject of Gaza, Trump said to Hewitt:

“... But they’ve got to finish what they started, and they’ve got to finish it fast, and we have to get on with life.”

That was his message all through the worst of COVID -- it needs to be over quickly, and people need to get on with their lives.

So I wouldn't say Trump is criticizing Netanyahu the way other critics are criticizing Netanyahu. Trump looks at Bibi and sees someone like himself. He would want to will the problem into non-existence. He can't understand why Netanyahu hasn't done that already.