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To the shock and surprise of many, Donald Trump just said “fuck” while speaking of Israel’s bombing of Tehran (the news skews it differently, and I’m not going to bother with repeating mainstream media’s lies.)
Most of us have been using the word in various iterations of shock, anger, and surprise, though perhaps for different reasons from why Trump felt compelled to drop the word, one that many news outlets have to call the “F-bomb” because of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations.
I will leave it to others to dissect this whirlwind of a time (and you can read my Friday Updates for links to some of the best analyses), but I was struck by the manner and the tone in which Trump addressed what he clearly is beginning to recognise as an Israel problem.
Trump appeared to be genuinely angry and, perhaps surprising himself, not in control of the situation, hence the “fuck.” He went on to excoriate what he persists in painting as the two sides of a war: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” Liberals and the entirety of the mainstream press agree with this misrepresentation, which ignores the reality of the current situation. Trump clearly hoped that supporting Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran would help him craft an image as a peacemaker in the region —Pakistan had been entertaining the idea of nominating him for the Peace Prize. That honour, such as it is, has already gone to Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama, two warmongerers, so adding Trump to the list would be unsurprising.
It’s worth noting Trump’s description of the current situation because of how he speaks of Israel and Iran as if they were two squabbling children, and as if he is their angry father ordering them to go to their separate corners. It is not unusual for Western leaders to adopt this posture towards Muslim-majority countries — the infantilisation is part of a long, Imperial project of defining non-Christians and dark-skinned people as helpless children who need a benevolent Empire to teach them how to act like grownups. But Israel occupies a particular place in the Western imaginary and imagination, carefully carved out as a non-Arab/non-Muslim nation on par with countries like the U.S., and in that context, Trump’s criticism of the country is unusual.
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There’s another part of this father-children dynamic that exploded into view today: Trump is acting like a man angry that the child he had favoured in the fight is not responding the way he wished. Again, many on the left have been warning about Israel for a long while, and this comes as no surprise to those who have been studying actual history and politics. Despite what liberals want to believe, Iran has not acted like a child — if anything, it has been acting more responsibly, and is unlikely to respond kindly to bullying (here, I am putting aside for now any critiques of the current regime). The father-children analogy, then, is more like that of a parent with one disobedient child.
This is a good time to remind readers of what I wrote in Current Affairs a few years ago, in my review of Mary Trump’s memoir of growing up as Trump’s niece. Liberals have read the book as an indictment of her uncle, but a closer look reveals that the dynamic of extreme paternalism dominates Mary’s consciousness, and it echoes liberal perceptions of the current situation:
But Mary Trump grants no agency or will at all to her father, portraying him as a helpless victim of his disease and of his bullying younger brother. This may, admittedly and sadly, just be a sign of Mary wanting to be a good or better daughter to a man who in turn apparently wanted always to be a good or better son to his own cold and unfeeling father. In the same vein, we could argue—and his niece does, in a way—that Donald Trump became a greedy, uncaring, and monstrous human being because he wanted to work so hard at being a good son, as cold and ruthless as his father, having supplanted the place of the eldest brother. All of this needlessly personalizes matters and leaves out the systems that created the Trumps and today’s America: Mary Trump is happy to reveal her grandfather’s coldness, but conveniently leaves out the fact that he was arrested, in 1927, for refusing to disperse from a Ku Klux Klan rally (years later, he would be charged with racist and exclusionary policies as a landlord, and Woody Guthrie, a tenant, famously wrote the unrecorded “Old Man Trump” about him). For her to admit to this would be admitting that the problems with this family go deeper than emotional manipulation and greed, and for us to contend with it would mean that we see Trumpian economic rapaciousness as being rooted in a long, terrifying history of capitalist domination and spread that has involved brutalizing millions in a centuries-long history that goes beyond mere “greed.” Which is to say: recognizing the systems that brought us the Trumps would mean recognizing how we are all implicated in history.
History is what Trump and his liberal critics had to face today, and perhaps a realisation that no amount of coaxing will convince Israel to behave better.
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For more on the constantly evolving situation, see Current Affairs, Al Jazeera, Electronic Intifada, and Democracy Now.
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