Taking the Long View on Trump's Foolish Zionism

America First is Advancing

Taking the Long View on Trump’s Foolish Zionism

Mr. Trump’s inordinate affection for Jews and Judaism is indeed a vice and puts the US into a Hebrew straightjacket with all the strategic and practical political disadvantages that result from bad foreign policy. God only knows where Trump gets his hot Zionism from. Was it his daughter’s conversion to Judaism and her marriage to a son of a convicted felon of that race? Was his lifetime residency on what Louis Auchincloss called “the skinny island” and capital of world Jewry, Manhattan, have some kind of effect on his political DNA? Is Trump just another boomer who watches too much TV and got brainwashed on the issue like so many other people? After all, Renegade Trad-Catholic priest Leonard Feeney probably put it best in 1957 when he said that “Having a television in your home is like having a jew in your living room.”

I know my kind readers must be tired of me writing it, but I have always seen Trump not as some kind of savior and dominant “man of destiny,” but as a transitional figure to break the ice and get things moving in the right direction. Trump was smart and observed the Buchanan campaigns for the presidency and figured that if Buchanan’s position on immigration was moderated slightly, it could be a road to the White House and he was right. For decades everyone knew that opinion poll after opinion poll told us that the American people were strongly anti-immigration, but no wealthy and influential political figure was brave enough to weather the storm of being called “racist” by the media, mainly because they were craven cowards. “The Donald” took that risk and rode it to power.

What Trump wasn’t banking on because of his political pragmatism, was that there would be an “illiberal” intellectual revolution in both Europe and the US and that many young men started discovering that America First was a sound concept. Alt-righters and Groypers started discovering the non-interventionist tendencies of the Paleo-Conservatives, which had largely disappeared from the political scene years ago, and liked what they saw. While Trump did criticize the Neo-Cons in his first administration over the Iraq and Afghan wars, it was not that in his opinion that the wars were foolish, but only because they were unsuccessful.

A recent Pew study found that among young Republican men 18-40 years of age, 50% have a negative view of Israel. Future Republican candidates for the presidency are going to have to moderate their views on the Zionist project or be frozen out of power. I’m optimistic that the needle against the Israeli exception to America First is moving in the right direction.