One cheer for Donald Trump - The Jewish Standard

What I’m about to say may confuse the couple of letter-writers who have name-called me as “Trump deranged.” But I’m now going to give one cheer (but not three) for our grossly corrupt, supremely inept president.

After three and a half months, thousands of dead across the Middle East and fifty billion expended from our tax money, Mr. Trump has belatedly accepted (but won’t actually admit) that he and Benjamin Netanyahu have lost their ill-conceived war with Iran and must now end it on terms very far from what any of us would have wanted.

Before going further, I have to add that those on the far right of Israeli politics and the Jewish Americans who accused Trump of “betrayal” are also very wrong. They are wrong for the simple reason that they ever trusted Trump, despite the fact that he was never actually on their side, which they had many reasons to know he wouldn’t be. Ask the Ukrainians, who have appealed to him repeatedly to support their besieged nation against Vladimir Putin’s aggression. It’s almost a given now that Trump is loyal to only one side, his own. At any given moment, we don’t know whether his decisions are motivated by the size of the bribe (a $400 million plane, massive investments in his family’s cryptocurrency business, or other inducements too numerous to count) or something else known mostly to himself.

Despite this, I’m inclined to give Mr. Trump the slight benefit of the doubt in this case to the extent of saying that even a broken clock is right twice a day.

The Middle East, the United States, and the world desperately need peace at this moment, and even some pretty bad terms are better than continuing the war. Trump’s idea of carrying out “regime change” on the very entrenched regime that holds power in a technologically advanced country of ninety million was always a fantasy. Who knew that Iran’s fleet of relatively inexpensive drones would outmatch two of the world’s most powerful armies by closing off the globe’s most significant channel for petroleum and other vital commodities? Three U.S. presidents actually knew such a war was folly: Presidents Biden, Obama, and George W. Bush, each of whom are understood to have made highly developed contingency plans for any necessary military confrontation with Iran.

Trump, who has taken every opportunity to promote greater dependence on fossil fuels, was a politician particularly vulnerable to the Iranians’ use of the oil weapon. His whole claim to be a leader good for the U.S. economy was also uniquely based on the idea that he could reduce the price of gas and other everyday goods for Americans. When oil and commodity prices ballooned, Trump had to at last see the writing on the wall: The Republicans’ chance of winning this coming midterm election has been decreasing significantly, a bad thing for his own power.

The Trump-Netanyahu regional war against Iran didn’t actually start this February, but on May 8, 2018. That’s the day when Mr. Trump, in his first term, unilaterally scuttled the successful Obama nuclear agreement with Iran (the JCPOA), although his cabinet and U.N. monitors reported that the Iranians were adhering to it. By walking out, he left Iran free to hugely increase its enrichment of uranium, creating the building crisis. Trump blowing up the JCPOA also meant foreclosing any possibility that a militarily constrained Islamic Republic with an opening to the West would find a path toward some moderation, in the economic interest of its own people. With no economic upside coming from the U.S., the hardliners in Tehran who have been the most extreme Israel-haters gained more ground within the Iranian government over the intervening years. Who knew that could happen? Trump never had an alternative that didn’t involve war. His focus unfortunately was to trash any successful accomplishment of his predecessor, America’s first Black president. He never seriously considered pushing to improve on the JCPOA while leaving it in place.

I’m concerned that the outline Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Iran doesn’t include anything more definite about Tehran’s denuclearization, doesn’t put any restrictions on its ballistic missile program, and promises various brand-new financial benefits to the Islamic State in return for reopening the shipping lanes that already had been completely open before the war was launched. But that seems to be the price people pay for losing a war that they themselves foolishly started.

What will happen now? If the de-escalation accompanying the MOU holds, my hope is that people will again realize that forever wars — without real diplomacy — work against the security of those who engage in them.Netanyahu talks about Israel being forever like the highly militarized Greek city-state of Sparta, but he somehow failed to learn that Sparta was a long-term failure.

While I’ll allow Donald Trump his one cheer for belatedly pulling back on the war he was foolish enough to start, I must say that as an American, I will never trust him, and I won’t feel at all safe until his power is over. People who care to do so can continue to call me a victim of Trump derangement if they wish.

But I’ll also point to Jewish history. We have had more than one tragic case of mass delusions connected to a false messiah. I guess that’s pardonable. But who would have thought that Jews, of all people, would fall victim to a false messiah who champions white, Christian nationalism, against all our values, and who depicts himself a stand-in for Jesus? If you fell into that kind of derangement, perhaps the recent sequence of events might cause you to rethink it.

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.

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