Donald Trump, False Messiah

Dateline Paris, December 17, 2020. The Electoral College, respecting the will of the people, has confirmed the results of the November 3rd election: 306 Joe Biden, 232 Donald Trump. No signs so far of a mass uprising in the Trump camp. The rule of law still prevails in the United States. Attorney General Barr, one of the last of the faithful, dutifully resigned after failing to discover the massive fraud so fervently desired by the president.

WHO’S THE CHEAT?

It is with great sorrow that I write this text that will widen the chasm between me and treasured friends that believe their exceptional has been robbed of an inevitable landslide victory against the senile Biden. Faced with the truth, they close their eyes and climb with their president-for-life to the ramparts of a multiform conspiracy theory that takes them further and further from reality. And from me.

For my American Trumpists, I’m an elitist European under the influence of outdated intellectual currents, unable to recognize, below the rough surface, the precious gem glowing in a heap of gravel. Trump is not just, despite appearances, a good president, he is the best president … of all times. A man above competence and beyond experience, who makes miracles where the guys in pin-striped suits have failed miserably. Foreign relations? Who needs regional specialists, experienced diplomats, and high level advisors? Trump, with a nose to the wind, can do better all alone than anyone…ever… The economy? Don’t ask. The billionaire didn’t need to be president to get rich. In the blink of an eye he created the best economy in the history of the United States… in the world…ever.

French and Israeli friends can’t understand why I contradict information they pick up from American Trumpists. They’re irritated by my stubbornness and surprised to see me run off the track, when we share values, a vision, and tender friendship. How can a Jewish American prefer the antisemitic/anti-Zionist Democrats to Israel’s best friend? I’d already lost an entire cohort of colleagues who’d been analyzing international events, side by side with me, since that fateful September 2000. We were reliable sources for each other. Today, so many are undone. A generation decimated on a grotesque battlefield.

It happened in a flash, during the Trump sneak attack on the Republican primaries. Like stunned soldiers rolling into the enemy camp, they lined up behind their champion, The Great & Mighty Donald Trump. Ever since, Trump has been sucking up the oxygen and they inflate his tires. This isn’t the place to review the four years of his term, the junk politics swallowed by recycled conservatives, but there’s no way of avoiding the sum total of five weeks [N.B. dateline 17 December] of shameful deception, slapdash court cases, cynical solicitation of the Supreme Court, baseless allegations, and disgraceful accusations thrown at honest officials. As lawsuits were shot down, one after the other, the scope broadened: there really truly was massive fraud…of megascopic proportions…so vast that it couldn’t be displayed in all its dimensions. No instance had the courage to dismantle it and hand the victory to the true and eternal president.

FROM THE IMAGINARY PANDEMIC TO THE STOLEN ELECTION

I wonder if pandemic denial would have inflamed so many conservative commentators if Donald Trump hadn’t set the tone. Assigning himself, as usual, the glorious role, he admitted to the old fox Bob Woodward that he’d kept to himself the awful truth about the novel coronavirus because he didn’t want to panic the population. Some surmise he thought he could dismiss the virus the way he’d kicked out disobedient appointees. Or did he think that, by letting the weak die and the strong work, he could protect the economic miracle that would ensure his reelection? Whatever. A slew of writers previously devoted to exposing stealth Islamization suddenly switched to denouncing the alarmists and profiteers of a public health crisis cooked up to harm Donald Trump. The zealous converts are against lockdowns and for hydroxychloroquine, anti-mask and pro the Swiss model, opposed to closing shops, bars, restaurants and gyms and suspicious of healthcare professionals, accused of falsifying stats of death by covid-19. They say the great majority of victims are elderly folks that would have died one way or the other before the year was out, so what’s the big deal if it’s covid. And now, the covid skeptics want to overturn a presidential election “contaminated by rotten ballots.”

PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

It’s been going on for over a month: allegations of massive fraud on a scale concretely impossible to organize, but so real for true believers. While the pandemic they scoffed at rises to new heights, killing two or three thousand a day [under 300/day in France]. The minimizers who told us last spring that covid-19 isn’t as scary as seasonal influenza don’t mind creating panic today…about the election that has brought Joe Biden to the White House doorstep. No way! They say our president is Trump, Trump the triumphant, the reelected, the enthroned. Setting aside their sermons against pandemic-panic, my former allies whip up a panic over the massive fraud that soiled the election. I receive an avalanche of articles every day, a flood of extravagant allegations: millions of ballots faked, misplaced, destroyed or fabricated. What wasn’t falsified on papier was altered electronically by machines made in Venezuela fitted with algorithms that changed Trump votes to Biden and sent them to be counted in Germany. The figures are dizzying. They drive you crazy!

After each barrage, I have to calm down and put my mind back in order. The diabolical operation commandeered by Biden himself and implemented by tens of thousands of accomplices without leaving any trace of concertation is impossible. But nothing less could satisfy the grandiose pretentions of the president. If you dive into the depths of the narrative, you can drown there. I come up for air and remind myself that I know how to separate fact from fiction. There was an election and there is a reality. It is knowable. I can consult reliable sources. They exist.

Conspiracy theories always sink to the dregs of antisemitism. To wit, the super conspiracy theorist, Lin Wood Esq., who exposes pedophiles in every milieu, finds them, just by chance, in the ranks of the Mossad too. A good 10% by his estimate. Wood is the colleague of the ex-former-future Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, retroactively cut out of the group photo, recently a favored visitor to the Oval Office. The lawsuit of “Biblical proportions” filed in Georgia last month by Powell and Wood turned out to be damp cardboard … like all the others.

THE JEWISH QUESTION

Here’s the paradox: in his desperate attempt to overturn the election, the best-friend-of-Israel doesn’t hesitate to rely on QAnon-friendly lawyers that my friends, in turn, approve and embrace. What’s the importance of a few liaisons dangereuses compared to all these goodies: the transfer of the embassy to Jerusalem; defense of the Jewish state against the UN pitbulls; telling off the Palestinians, cutting off funds to l’UNWRA; recognizing Israeli sovereignty in the Golan and Judea-Samaria; normalization with the UAE, Bahrein, Sudan, Bhutan, Morocco & so much more balm for our heart …Tell me that Donald Trump is not good for the Jews!

It’s heartbreaking. Why does he have to be the one that speaks a bit of truth and gives us a bit of justice when we’re slapped with insults and mistreated on all sides? Ungrateful American Jews cling to their progressivism? So what. It’s not for their votes that he blessed us with generosities. The electoral gold of Evangelicals is no secret. But I don’t question Trump’s motives. I just deplore the fact that noble Zionist aspirations are associated with a dishonest man who has contempt for the values I defend. I’m concerned about backlash from diehard supporters that will be forced one day to recognize his defeat. Are we so pitiful that we have to excuse everything from this man that does us a bit of good? You can divorce from the father or mother of your children but it’s impossible to separate from a president that’s going head first into ignominy? Politics isn’t a love story! Can’t we keep what we earned and pull out of this game?

PERSONALITY CULT AND WORSE

States certified the results and, on December 14th, the Electoral College followed suit. Game over? Not for Trump loyalists. According to their implacable logic, every argument, every official, every commentator, every judge that refuses to rubber stamp the allegation of massive fraud instantly becomes an accomplice of the Democrat’s coup d’Etat. Impossible to consider new elements that might undermine the version dictated the day after the polls closed. Reality is not to seek, it is imposed by the ruler and upheld by the faithful.

Where does this Islamic-style verticality come from, and how can we understand that today it strikes those that for twenty years were warning against Islamization of the Western mind? I analyzed, back then, the attack on rational thought, which is the foundation of our civilization [Lethal narratives ]. Now I’m faced with one of those lethal narratives: the election was stained with massive fraud, Donald Trump won “by a lot.” The day after the Electoral College confirmed the victory of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the allegations just kept flowing. American Thinker [sic], American Greatness, Federalist Pages, Breitbart, Frontpage Magazine, Epoch Times, townhall.com, PJMedia, Gateway pundit … If you read them, it makes you crazy.

FULL SPEED AHEAD

Some sixty baseless lawsuits, the tally confirmed and reconfirmed, but they keep on fighting those windmills. They live in an imaginary world, impermeable to reality. In real life courtrooms, the high-octane legal team filed scrambled briefs far below the sensational arguments pumped into friendly media where, untethered, they keep serving warmed over, fantasied, breathless, baseless, relentless accusations. And it’s so enormous that it feeds its master. Accuse, accuse, something will surely stick. Six weeks after the election, cherished friends send me the recurrent scoops as if they had just been discovered. Look at this, my dear, it’s like I said, those Dominion machines… In three mouse clicks I find the debunk, forward it to my informer and ask him why they’ve never been able to prove this thing in court. He sidesteps, sends me a different one, and endless other outdated disproven garish falsehoods. Look at that, sweetheart, and tell me it’s not a clincher.

I mutter under my breath: Stop with the neo-Inquisition! If you can’t prove allegations, drop them!

MIDEAST CONFLICT? LET ME HANDLE IT

Wasn’t that a beautiful promise from the cad, Donald Trump, as he grabbed the nomination from stunned Republicans? That Mideast conflict, he boasted, is a tough one. But I can pull it off. Today he can congratulate himself on a fait accompli. Luckily, the Palestinian leadership turned down their share of the deal of the century—one more version of that side-by-side state dear to all peacemakers. But the normalization of relations with several Muslim nations is moving forward quickly and warmly, breaking the longstanding Palestinian veto. Dayenu. Even though it bears the marks of a tricky property developer: Sudan cleared of the Darfur genocide, Morocco gifted with the Western Sahara, and all these regimes built on shifting sands lined up to buy the latest weapons…

Here’s the normalization I want: the end of politics as tribal warfare! I hunger for open-minded debate with precious friends that hear a different tune while their hearts still beat in harmony with mine.

Haver, when they talk about the matsav, I don’t want it to mean what’s gone wrong between you and me.

[The above is my translation of the original French text published by Tribune Juive. It has not been updated but I think recent events have confirmed its relevance.]