David Brooks NYT column, “Donald Trump Is Not Playing by Your Rules,” is interesting, but gives Trump too much credit for thinking, or at least for having a basic idea that he is implementing. It contrasts with Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the Atlantic, “A Senior White House Official Defines the Trump Doctrine: ‘We’re America, Bitch,’” which says there is no underlying Trump foreign policy: America does whatever it wants. Both analyses lead to the same conclusion: Trump doesn’t care what the world thinks.
I am disappointed that these are both Jews who are criticizing Trump for breaking with generations of foreign policy ideals, but I agree with them. There is no excuse for Trump’s attack on Justin Trudeau. What Trudeau said after the G-7 summit ware not the “false statements” that Trump said it was. Trudeau’s saying that Canada will not be pushed around is not “dishonest and weak.” It’s a simple statement of fact.
Larry Kudlow made the argument that Trump needed to look strong before going into his meeting with Kim Jong Un, but as it turned out, he did not look strong when he met Kim, and didn’t really get anything significant from the meeting with him. The Iran deal Trump denigrates had much more substance and did much more to limit Iran’s nuclear program than Trump’s deal with Kim.
I have tried to defend Trump, mainly because he represents white men who are increasingly being displaced by almost everyone else, blacks, women, Hispanics, but especially by Jews. Brooks and Goldberg are representative of the Jewish intellectual establishment, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Bloomberg, and Adelson represent the Jewish financial and wealth establishment. Schumer, Feinstein, Blumenthal, Schiff, and Polis represent the Jewish political establishment at the national level. While there are still white men at the top of some of these lists — Buffet and Bill Gates, McConnell and Ryan, they are getting older.
Increasingly, though, I am displeased to have Trump as a leading example of white men in power. I have looked the other way at many of the boorish things he has done, but I am getting tired of it — his personal peccadillos and his professional faux pas. His tweets are terrible, often mean and nasty with poor grammar. The good side of his character is that he has the tough hide to take the criticism from the left. I support him on immigration, for example, but so far he has done almost nothing on that issue. He has tried, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals as won most of the showdowns on immigration.
