Published: 2 November 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
DONALD TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY of the United States has generated fear and loathing across the world, and rarely has an international election provoked such trepidation as the one taking place later today. Over the past four years Trump’s litany of lies, deceit, personal vulgarity, racial and religious bigotry and self-interested policy has left people across the political divide shaking their heads at each new low.
He has degraded American authority in the world’s capitals, turned the high office of president into a streetfighter’s shed and exploited a deep vein of resentment across American society. The list of his personal and political failings is too long to document, but it includes denialism of Covid, colluding with Russian intervention in the 2016 election, inhumane treatment of refugees coming from Mexico, and his pressuring of the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation of his chief rival, Joe Biden.
Trump’s defenders have argued that by cutting taxes he has improved the US economy, ignoring the fact that the real beneficiaries are the rich, rather than the strugglers he promised to help in 2016. They have also argued he is the only leader to have stood up to China’s economic and political expansionism. While this is true, as the New York Times wrote in a recent editorial, “he has conducted a tit-for-tat trade war, imposing billions of dollars in tariffs — taxes that are actually paid by Americans — without extracting significant concessions from China”.
Trump’s record on issues of concern to Jewish people is contradictory but ultimately disgraceful. He has given consistent support to right-wing racist and anti-Semitic groups, through his tolerance of racist violence at Charlottesville to his failure to condemn the Proud Boys during a presidential debate with Biden. These political signals have given permission for right-wing individuals to attack US synagogues, killing innocent people, and fostering a general atmosphere of intimidation.
His general indifference to human rights and social justice extends from his expediency over Chinese suppression of Uighurs to his threat to call out the military to put down the Black Lives Matter protests, to his encouragement of Benjamin Netanyahu’s appetite for annexation of West Bank Palestinian communities.
Trump’s supporters on the Right of politics, in Israel, America and here in Australia, have celebrated his conspicuous support for Israel and his bromance with Netanyahu. “Trump has been good for Israel”, they argue, pointing to the recent “normalisation” deals his administration brokered with the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan, with strong hints of more to come from other Arab states.
While these agreements are undeniably a step forward for Israel in its desire to gain acceptance by the Arab world, they nevertheless mask the moral failings and political eclipse of Trump’s earlier “Deal of the Century”. This much-vaunted plan to bring peace to the Middle-East offered the Palestinians an insulting and unrealistic group of small, disparate parcels of territory as the basis of a state, which the Palestinian leadership predictably rejected out of hand. He also pressured Netanyahu to secretly agree to the US sale of F35 fighters to UAE as part of the deal.
That proposal revealed the extent of Trump’s partisanship for Netanyahu’s far-right vision of the region. They have been followed by the Arab normalisation deals, which appear designed to alienate the Palestinians and their cause. The net result is that a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the core benchmark of all Middle-East diplomacy, has been effectively pushed further from reality than before.
Whichever criteria you use to judge Donald Trump, he has been a disaster for civil society and the causes that Jewish people hold dear. The Jewish Independent sincerely hopes that the American people see the gravity of their situation, vote in large numbers to turn him out of office, choose Joe Biden and begin the long process of restoring common decency and moral authority to the role of president.
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Israel's Netanyahu praises Trump policies ahead of election (US ABC)
Israel’s leader has praised President Donald Trump’s Mideast policies, even as he avoids openly taken sides ahead of the US presidential election
Palestinians hoping for Biden, doubtful of change (Ynet)
While most Palestinians believe Democrats taking the White House would mean an end to Trump's policy of maximum pressure, they do not believe it will turn back the clock on the Republican president's actions in the region
Photo: AP/Patrick Semansky
