Berl Falbaum
Veteran Political Journalist/Author
If you are still waiting for some scandal, or some crude, gross, indecent remark, or some outrageous behavior to take Donald Trump down, you obviously haven’t been listening for seven years.
Each time we had a new revelation, we would say, “Ah, this is it,” from Stormy Daniels, to pressuring the Ukrainian president to become involved in the U.S. election, to January 6, to being convicted of sexual assault, to being indicted on 34 charges of fraud, to the present indictment of 37 charges involving the nation’s most closely held secrets.
But it has never been “it.” Indeed, he has only gotten stronger in the polls. He is the favorite to win the Republican nomination for president by a huge margin (some 30 points) and, summing up general election polls, he is basically running head-to-head with Joe Biden.
Even Trump acknowledged he doesn’t understand how his polls continue to increase despite the “bad publicity.”
So, I thought it is worth looking ahead and speculate what another Trump administration would look like. And we have a template which give us some clues: the political scenario in Israel.
The similarities between the U.S. led by Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are more than just intriguing; they are scary.
Some background first: Netanyahu, who has been charged with corruption, was reelected in December to a sixth term as prime minister after forming the most far-right coalition in the country’s history. His cabinet includes not just racists and xenophobes, but some with criminal records.
Almost immediately, his government proposed reform of Israel’s judiciary, basically giving the Knesset (Parliament) the power to overrule Supreme Court decisions. The proposal also would alter the appointment process of justices.
While Israel does not have a constitution, it nevertheless operates like the U.S., on the separation of powers. In response to Netanyahu’s attempt to run roughshod over the judiciary, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets to protest this threat to the only democracy in the Middle East.
Now, think Trump. If elected, he will not make the mistake he made in his first term. The mistake? Trump believed that as president, he could run the government as he did the Trump Organization, i.e., what he ordered would be obeyed -- no questions asked.
He appointed some capable people, expecting them to do his bidding (Mattis, Kelly, McMaster and others), not realizing that these appointees had some concern for such “trivial” issues like the Constitution, the law, ethics, morality, and truth.
Next time, Trump will not make the same error, and he is foaming at the mouth to get his revenge. As he has already stated, “I am your justice…I am your retribution.”
Let us conjecture what a Trump “coalition” could look like:
--Rudy Giuliani or a Giuliani-like figure might well be named attorney general and all the lawyers who defended Trump for the past seven years might staff the Justice Department.
--Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, whom Trump pardoned after he was convicted for lying to the FBI, might well be named to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
--Steve Bannon, a former top strategist for Trump who was also pardoned by Trump after being accused of defrauding donors, might return to the White House as a major presidential advisor.
Others who might be asked to join the Trump team are: Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan; Mehmet Oz, who lost a close race for the Senate in Pennsylvania; Kari Lake, who lost the race for governor in Arizona; the pillow guy, Mike Lindell; Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff; Senator Lindsey O. Graham; and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley.
Honorary mentions for possible appointments are: Paul Manafort, another former Trump official who received a pardon; Roger Stone, a close Trump friend who was convicted for lying to Congress; Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton; and let’s not forget Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
That kind of roster should give even hardcore Trumpites some shivers. Probably not. Sorry, lost my head for a minute.
Nah, you respond, this is not possible. Well, Trump tried it before he left office when he wanted to appoint Jeffrey Clark, a Trump ally, attorney general.
Trump had to back down but only because he faced the threat of mass resignations in the DOJ if he proceeded with the appointment. The next time there would be no guardrails.
David Remnick, New Yorker editor, writes in the preface of the January 6 Report:
“Should he win back the White House, he will come to office with no sense of restraint. He will inevitably be an even more radical, more resentful, more chaotic, more authoritarian version of his earlier self.”
I may be wrong about the potential appointees cited earlier. That’s not the point. The point is that he will do all he can to build a Trump team that will work in unison to carry out the policies of this morally-ethically flawed, corrupt -- and very dangerous -- man.
As I indicated above, many of the members of Netanyahu’s coalition share characteristics, including criminal records, with Trump acolytes.
Some believe the Israeli leader proposed judicial reform with the objective of having legislation adopted that would protect him from going to jail, should he be convicted.
That also could become a reasonable and plausible objective for Trump.
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