Category: general

t has been a tough week for the professional Donald Trump haters. Only the most unhinged of them could not share in the joy of the families of the surviving Israeli hostages as they were reunited on Monday. But there must always be liberal ghosts at any feast of which Trump is the host. “Everyone should be glad that the hostages have been freed” and hope “that this peace process succeeds,” acknowledged the editor of The New Republic, Michael Tomasky. But? Well, “he’s still the Donald Trump who is destroying democracy and ruining lives here in America.” “We may grimace in doing so,” wrote Kenneth Roth in The Guardian, “but Donald Trump deserves credit for finally ending the U. S. government’s funding and arming of the genocide, and arm-twisting Benjamin Netanyahu into accepting his 20-point plan for Gaza.” This was more than Guardian columnist Owen Jones was prepared to concede. His commentary yesterday carefully avoided giving Trump any credit for the ceasefire and the return of the hostages, ranting instead that “Israel’s Western-facilitated genocide. will boomerang back to the West from the killing fields of Gaza.” At least Tomasky was prepared to entertain “the possibility that the Trump-Netanyahu worldview got it right this time.” The New Statesman went further. Freddie Hayward’s account of the Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal explicitly acknowledged the triumph of “the dealmakers.” But it bemoaned the new world order that this triumph signifies: “a world in which Trump rules like an emperor. a world where leaders court the president’s favor to receive his patronage and avoid his wrath. Institutions such as the United Nations are ignored. Diplomacy is personal. Job titles matter less than getting things done. Raw power dominates international law. And protecting capital takes precedence over protecting human rights.” The key roles played by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner-respectively, Trump’s friend and son-in-law-were especially painful for Hayward to acknowledge. But he could not deny it: “Trump succeeded in ending the war in Gaza, where Biden and his expert class failed.” It is excruciating for anyone on the left to admit any of this. For all these authors are in the grip of a pathetic nostalgia for a vanished age in which the United Nations mattered; job titles mattered; international law mattered; and human rights transcended mere economics. They appear not to have processed that “Biden and his expert class failed” precisely because all those things ceased to work many years ago.