In a New York Times Op-Ed Roger Cohen says the Israeli Prime Minister has shown how a embattled Donald Trump just COULD manage the unthinkable ....
A second term as President….
Cohen points out that Bibi Netanyahu stayed in the Right lane…
Took EVERY inch of it to produce a win that isn’t decisive …
But IS a win….
Donald Trump likewise is dancing solely with the American Right…
He only has around 40% of the America supporting him….
But to win a American Presidency?
It’s WERE the votes come from…
NOT how many….
Donald Trump belies that he can repeat getting votes from those who voted for Obama and Biden TWICE again…
(Democrats need some old Obama voters next year… They cannot win the electoral contest without them….Joe Biden WAS Obama’s Vice President for 8 years)
Bibi IS gonna get indicted….
Donald Trump isn’t….
He may have MORE legal problems, in whole
But unlike Bibi?
Trump is straight up trying to beat down the cops and proscutors….
And as Cohen writes?
Bibi and Donald are GREAT FRONT men….
They promise things they can’t deliver …
And it’s enough….
Nobody I’ve read that knows about Bibi thinks he’s actually gonna annex the West Bank…
Nobody believe’s Trump will build a 2,000 mile wall…
But in Israel?
Like in America….
A Good amount of people will vote , no matter what, for a guy who they feel is strong, even if he’s a crook…
Cohen could be right….
Democrats SHOULD NOT be JUST going hard Left….
House Speaker Pelosi’s and Senate Minority Leader Schumer know THAT….
But everyday, aided by the media…
Democratic progressives on the left are trying steer the party to place that they want and would certainly hand Donald Trump the White House keys for four MORE years….
They don’t much care about tomorrow…
They’re just into themselves today….
It was a referendum on him and he nailed it. Nobody can take that away from Benjamin Netanyahu. This summer, in his fifth term, he will surpass David Ben-Gurion as the longest-serving Israeli prime minister. Enough said.
His victory contains a warning for any Democrat still imagining that the 2020 election will bring an easy victory over Donald Trump. The Netanyahu playbook will be President Trump’s next year. Gather nationalist and religious voters in your camp, add in a strong economy, dose with fear, sprinkle with strongman appeal, inject a dash of racism and victory is yours — whatever indictments are looming.
It’s not that this could happen. It will happen, absent some decisive factor to upend the logic of it. Netanyahu is savvier than Trump, but they share a shrewd assessment of how to control and manipulate the politics of spectacle, as well as a fierce determination to stay out of jail. They campaign ugly….
…
His victory was personal but it was also structural. Israel now has a structural majority of the right. This will almost certainly enable Netanyahu to form a right-wing government, even though his Likud party appeared tied with the Blue and White party of his upstart challenger, Benny Gantz, each winning 35 seats.
The Gantz performance was remarkable. It demonstrated the deep disquiet of liberal Israel over Netanyahu the King. But in the end Gantz took more votes from the left — the Labor Party and Meretz — than from the right. As Avi Scharf, editor of the English edition of the liberal daily Haaretz, put it to me, “Israel’s founding left is totally obliterated.”
The structural majority of the right is composed of the ultra-Orthodox, the settler movement, Mizrahi Jews of North African and Middle Eastern descent, nationalists of various stripes and Russian immigrants like the one who recently told my friend Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist, “I don’t want to live under Putin, but I want my leader to be like Putin.”….
image…5jt.com