The Wit and Wisdom of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu
In this festive holiday season, no one’s going to deprive me of my right to vent my spleen too—righteously, of course.
No sooner had the ink dried, so to speak, on my last article, than both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu just had to, in the middle of the Christmas season and after a weekend of particularly senseless violence, demonstrate yet again why they are not world leaders, and hardly even human beings.
While a fugitive was at large after having gunned down students at Brown University, and after a father/son duo went on an anti-Semitic killing spree at the (ironically named) Bondi Beach in Australia, the weekend was topped off by famed Hollywood producer and activist Rob Reiner and his wife being savagely stabbed to death in their own home.
Within 12 hours, their bodies still warm, Donald Trump just couldn’t help himself of course. He just had to vent his spleen on his Orwellian-named “Truth Social” platform to damn Reiner with faint praise:
“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS…He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”
As is typical of this snide, catty old drag queen, he can’t resist baring his claws and taking one last swipe at a long-time and very justified political critic of his. “A very sad thing”? Sure. He was probably popping champagne bottles. “Tortured and struggling?” Over what? What hypocrisy haunted Rob Reiner’s conscience that Donald Trump couldn’t resist projecting onto him?
Oh, that’s right. Reiner caused his own death! How? He had such a bad case of “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS,” as to incite his attacker to stab them to death with a knife. Sure.
Who had done this to them and why was not even clear at the time. Police have since taken into custody Reiner’s own estranged son, who had been struggling with drug addiction for decades. But Donald Trump with his God-like power of omniscience, knew the attacker had to have been “driven CRAZY” by Reiner’s “raging obsession” with…oh, that’s right. Donald Trump!1
Such A Familiar Rodeo
As if we should be surprised. Donald Trump has got us so trained that he’s the 79-year old toddler running around the house making a mess, while we’re all just supposed to dutifully follow along picking up after him. As such he is the logical end result of 50 years of messes made by his party. Perhaps that is why Republicans just shrug it off as the price we pay to be the grateful recipients of his “genius,”2 his “weave,” and other delusions he foists off on the world around him.
Of course, leave it to Mr. “Me-o-Centrism,” the plague of our time, to politicize it and make it all about himself. Reiner was a victim of his own “massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease” known as…a revulsion of Donald Trump and everything he stands for, as if that’s a disease.
What is this? Shades of the old Soviet Union, that if you criticize the State for any reason, you must be insane and locked up in an asylum where they can do drug experiments on you? No wonder he loves Russia so much!
The biggest victim I know suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome is Donald Trump himself, secondly his clueless base. Facts, history, moral standards—nothing matters to these people.3 Donald Trump is a reprobate, shameless gas-lighter who’s a master at “vexing the libs,” and that’s all they really care about. That is, until you wake up one day and realize you’re in a parade being led by a fool (Mt 15:14).
None of this even touches upon the question of just basic human empathy, but of course the two are connected. Donald Trump cannot feel for the plight of other people, simply because he’s so childishly self-centered.
Or appropriateness. Whatever happened to that old adage your mother always told you, that “if you don’t have something good to say, don’t say anything at all”? Every day, media all around the world broadcast everything this madman spews. Foreign governments hang on his every word, simply because America is too big and too powerful to ignore. And MAGA America, the biggest patriots of them all don’t you know, couldn’t care less about our reputation.
Or his jealousy of Hollywood celebrities, endlessly trashing their “lack of talent.” After all, he’s the only perennially-unsung, unappreciated star worth “celebrating,” and since no one does enough of it, he just goes ahead and gives himself awards.4 He just can’t stop projecting onto everyone else his own sense of entitlement to hog the spotlight. Like a male version of Miss Piggy with no sense of irony, he tells female reporters just doing their jobs, “Quiet, Piggy!”
The Church’s Pathetic “Witness” To The World
I never met Rob Reiner, but I had the impression he was a real decent guy who was more concerned about the destruction of the democratic paradigm in the US than his own liberal views. When we held a “No Kings” rally in Santa Monica in October, he was the only celebrity I was aware of who showed up to address and encourage the gathered protestors.
A MAGA detractor just had to show up too of course, covered in tactical gear to intimidate him, get in his face, and try to shut him up. Reiner was very patient, trying to appeal to a sense of manners in the man. After all, he could have staged his own rally down the street and left ours alone, but that’s not the MAGA idea of liberty. It wasn’t until the guy tried to throw a punch at someone nearby that the Santa Monica police, gathered around watching this fiasco, finally arrested him!5
While Rob told Bill Maher in a 2012 interview that he was an atheist, in a recent interview he said something to the effect that, although he was Jewish, he believed in the things Jesus taught, something like that. I want to believe, that with just a little bit of nudging, he could have been brought to full faith in Christ.
But the atmosphere Christians set in this country is so toxic, people would rather die than be identified with us! Believe me, I know that from first-hand experience, including (and maybe especially) in Hollywood. And who can blame them?
I just find this whole situation so embarrassing for the faith. “Christians” here, well on their way to becoming the hypocritical tares Jesus warned about (Mt 13:38-40), would rather slap His name on the country, then promote the most cruel and spiteful policies. This is their idea of “tough love,” yet it’s so much easier than having to go through the hard work of winning the world over! It’s all such a tragedy.
Whence Forth Cometh This Projection?
It has been noted many times that everything Trump and MAGA world say are either confession or projection. But do they do this unconsciously or deliberately? Sometimes it’s hard to tell (II Tim 3:13). As I have tried to make the case in the past, Donald Trump is fully aware that 90% of what comes out of his mouth is pure bullshit, but he doesn’t care. He is very aware of what he is doing, but again, he just doesn’t care, which arguably is the definition of a rebrobate.
When you think about it, this is more than just unconscious projection on his part, but some kind of a perverse psychological warfare he’s perpetrating upon the world. Is there anything more psychopathic than going around guilt mongering people about things you yourself know you’re doing? Vladimir Putin ensconced in the Oval Office couldn’t be more effective.
I don’t think he learned this directly from Putin however, even though Putin is famous for using this exact same kind of gaslighting tactic on his own much-abused population. Trump on the other hand learned it from the Israelis—uh, I’m sorry, Roy Cohn—who pursued the same practical philosophy Israel operates under.
I say that because, although Roy Cohn was not religiously-motivated, he had, like so many Zionist partisans, inculcated into his soul the very tactics that have been afflicting the Jewish people ever since the days of Jesus. In fact, the Jewish community all over the world is presently struggling with this question of, “What does it mean to be Jewish?”
It is a very legitimate question, and while I believe the right answer is recognizing Jesus Christ to be their Messiah, I don’t want to protrude into their internal debate too much. I consider them to be the most intelligent and intellectually accomplished ethnic group in the world,6 all things considered. I want to respect the fact that they have a brain and can figure things out on their own.
The Jewish Legacy
On the other hand, I’m more than happy to wander into this intellectual minefield all the same. (Just trying to be helpful after all!) And while I don’t mean to be tedious here and get too deep into the weeds, I think it’s important to understand the background of how the traditional Jewish mindset got to be this way.
Specifically, the roots of this mystery go all the way back to the days of Jesus. At that time in Judea, there were basically four different religious groups vying for the hearts of the nation—the Essenes, the Sadducees, the “Messianic Jews” who followed Jesus Christ, and the Pharisee movement.
The Essenes were an obscure bunch of mystics out in the desert who had little impact on the nation. The Sadducees were associated with the priesthood and the upper class, and lost all influence once the Temple and Jerusalem fell to the Romans. As for the Christians, well, we know they were largely persecuted and driven out of Jerusalem.
That left the Pharisees. The Pharisees were the lay followers of the rabbi movement which had its roots going back five centuries to the days of Ezra and the return from Babylon around 536 BC.
This is a huge history that spanned nearly a millennium of evolution, so I’ll try to keep it short. Ezra revived a command by Moses to read the entire Law to the people gathered together at the Feast of Tabernacles.7 This was designed to help them understand the Law so they would never again suffer another Babylonian Captivity.
After he died, other scribes continued the practice. Over time, a lot of debate arose among them over hypothetical legal situations, speculation on the barebones stories of their history and other matters. The best of these scribes became known as rabbis (“beloved teachers”) around whom a group of lay followers emerged known as the Pharisees (“separated ones”).
By the time this got to Jesus’ day, this rabbi/Pharisee movement was dominating the religious life of Judea, yet Jesus took a lot of issue with them. He complained that their customs, rulings and traditions were nullifying the actual commandments of the Law of Moses; that they were burdening the people with extra-legal requirements; that their rabbinic law was becoming more authoritative than the written Law, etc.
What a lot of people don’t understand is that the religion of Judaism did not officially start back on Mt. Sinai (as they claim), but two centuries after the birth of Christ!8 It was then when a certain Judah na-Nasi wrote down their Oral Law into the Mishnah.9 To this was added the Gemara, the earliest rabbinic commentaries. These two documents form the authoritative basis for the religion of Judaism, not the Scriptures per se.10
Then Came “The Logic”
You might be inclined to ask, What’s the point? Well, the rabbi/Pharisees developed a “culture of argument,” wherein they occupied themselves with a lot debate. And one of the most foundational questions they wrestled with was, “What does it mean to be the Chosen People?”
Their answer set the tone for all the problems their people have been entangled with ever since, summed up in a famous Talmudic maxim, “God gave the covenant to us, not to them [the Gentiles].”
In the Bible, the word “chosen” when used spiritually, is a term signifying beauty, balance, inspiration, etc., but it was originally a pottery term. When a potter made an excellent vessel, he would put it in the “window” outside his shop and call it his “chosen vessel,” his “choicest vessel,” etc. In other words, the idea conveyed was that of “being the best.”
Thus, in the spiritual parallel, it spoke of God’s hope that Israel would be an excellent people, a light to the nations (I Pet 2:9), to draw the Gentiles to God and thus be saved.11 But it was not what the rabbinic concept conveyed, which was the idea of entitlement, privilege, and racial identity.
Worse yet, it led to a train of logic that locked them into an inability to see things objectively. To wit, they assumed that “all the Gentiles must be invariably jealous and resentful of the Jew,” and worse yet again, that this hatred was “ineradicable,” i.e., built right into their genes.
This was a lot of vanity to indulge, that the outside world was even aware of or cared about Jewish religious philosophy. And yet the “logic” didn’t even stop there, “Since we are so few in number and the Gentiles so many, we are justified in misleading them from time to time in order to protect ourselves.” How, when, where, and how much are endless debates that take up a lot of ink in the pages of the Talmud.
Jesus’ Perspective
People from the dawn of time have been deceiving, gaming and playing one another in order to get an advantage. It’s a process of manipulation laced with a lot of dishonesty, dirty tricks and everything imaginable, and as everyone knows, everyone hates to be its victim, to be played for a fool. People seriously resent it, but few times in history have people had the crust to turn such a vice into an entire philosophy of virtue, as long as it serves the interest of their little group.12
One of the fallouts of such a “logic” is that it can lead to gross levels of myopia and hypocrisy. I have thus long been an advocate of “hypocrisy management” in people’s lives (not just anger management). Nobody ever perfectly practices what they preach, thus, hypocrisy happens. But there’s hypocrisy, and then there’s hypocrisy!
Jesus sarcastically referred to this in His comments about removing a mote out of a brother’s eye when there’s a beam in your own (Mt 7:3). He was clearly mocking the Pharisees here, who often “strained out a gnat while swallowing a camel” (Mt 23:24),13 who were seemingly unaware of how blind they were to their own “point of view.”
Yet this is exactly where they ended up. In a way, Jesus was asking the Pharisaical world, Is the problem here really anti-Jewish bias, or anti-Gentile bias? After all, who defined themselves in such a way as to cut themselves off from “a decent respect for the opinions of Mankind” (as the Founders so much later put it) to justify themselves, first, last and always? Or as I put it in an old article, Who started this fight, a fight that continues to this day?
Modern-Day Liberation
The point I’m trying to make is that it’s the Pharisee philosophy, established for nearly two millennia now, that has historically determined what it means to be “Jewish.” Neither Christian Jews nor any other group had a lock on Jewish identity thereafter. And what they were taught was a view of themselves versus the rest of the world that set them up for endless strife and conflict.
After the loss of their Temple, the rabbis led much of the people back to Babylon no less, to establish their yeshiva schools and refine their thinking, where they held a totalitarian grip on their people like few others.14 Even the splinter faction of atheist Jews who founded Soviet Communism brought the Pharisee philosophy of deceit with them.
This is why I say it was the Bolshevik Revolution that opened the door to the cynical modern world and its “Deep State” preoccupation with deception as a way of life. This so-called “ethic” spread from Moscow to the Nazis to the CIA, the MI6, the Mossad and every other covert paradigm/“Deep State” black hole afflicting major nations ever since. As such it is probably the single greatest factor contributing to the extreme wickedness of our time that God foretold (Dan 8:23).
However, a wonderful thing was happening to the Jewish people at the same time. With the advent of the modern age, Jews like all other peasants, became citizens under the direct rule of the State. As such, many streamed out of those ghettos and started the German Jewish Enlightenment for example, escaping the stranglehold those rabbis had on their minds.
Many ended up in nations like the United States, a country started by men who were students of the Enlightenment, a sort of secular version of the Protestant Reformation, a Christian reform movement no less! Today, all over the TV you’ll see Jewish lawyers, professors, politicians, public officials, entertainers, etc, sticking their necks out, defending our traditional way of life and Constitution against the abuse of people like Epstein, Dershowitz, Wexler, Stephen Miller and their “two-fold more the child of hell” than themselves, Donald Trump (Mt 23:15).
Finally, Lord Netanyahu!
Which brings us to our second beast of the week (Rev 13:11), Mr. Israel himself, Benjamin Netanyahu. Very predictably, in the wake of a horrific father-son Islamist terror attack in Australia during a Hanukkah celebration, he couldn’t resist brow-beating Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for facilitating it. How? Because Australia recently recognized Palestinian statehood.
Yes, this is hard-core Talmudic “logic” on full display. Because billions of people, including their own children, college students, people of all walks of life around the world are outraged at Israel’s wanton disregard for all those Nuremberg-style laws defining and criminalizing war crimes, a development she herself was in the forefront of championing at the time, they must be shut up because it’s ‘helping Hamas’”!
In other words, no, no, it can’t be our fault. We are special. We are an entitled people, allowed to operate on a double standard. Deny, deny, deny, attack, attack, attack. This is what we will do to you with impunity. We will recruit and rape your children as a policy of state, a long-planned, covert blackmail operation. We will punish you for boycotting us. You don’t have a right to organize against us and refuse to buy our products!
You could see the same attitude amongst our own stone-cold Pharisees, the MAGA world, when Charlie Kirk was killed, an assassination which may yet be determined to have been an Israeli hit job itself. Instantly, people all over America were told that they must show the proper level of mourning for a man they may have despised. Some Americans simply posted quotes about all the vile things he had to say over the years, and they lost their jobs over it!15
Some freedom of speech. But hard-core Talmudic culture has always been totalitarian, and this conflict within the global “what does it mean to be Jewish” debate is partly what is tearing Israeli society itself up. Half the country wants a more democratic and less psychotic society while the other, dominated by the revival of fundamentalist religious dogma centered in West Bank yeshivas, screams to purge all Gentiles from the land.16
The question is, which side is America going to side with? Better yet, which side of American political and spiritual philosophy are Americans going to side with?
Do We Need A Psychological Profile On Bibi Too?
Yes, if only Australia hadn’t “rewarded Hamas” and instead just caved to Israeli guilt-mongering, these two Islamists wouldn’t have been emboldened to do what they did. This in spite of decades of evidence that world condemnation has never stopped Islamic extremists from carrying out terrorist attacks in the past.
Like I said about Trump’s savage philosophy of life hanging out over his belt without shame or apology all the time, likewise Benjamin Netanyahu either cannot or will not see how Israel’s own policies cause all the daily misery his citizens live under. No one after all, loves Islamic extremists more than Benjamin Netanyahu. They provide for him the all pretext he needs.
If understanding is the ability to connect the cause and effect between two things (Prov 4:7), why is it that Netanyahu and so many in Israeli society can’t seem to understand that it’s their own actions that are causing the near-universal condemnation they are now experiencing? It’s the legacy of the Talmudic identity foisted upon them for centuries now. Truly, do the Jewish people ever need some space to re-evaluate again.
Indeed, Hamas, having had decades of experience dealing with their Zionist adversary, counted on Israel overreacting to their attack. What do they know about the Israeli “mentality” that much of the world trips over all the time? Furthermore, the whole region knows about Israel’s ambitions.
Are they just blind (Mt 23:24; Rom 11:25)? Perhaps. Or maybe they are very aware of their manipulative ways and are quite okay with them. How else shall God judge the world if we aren’t conscious of our guilt and deceit (“guile”—Psa 32:2)?
I and countless others in our world have compiled a mountain of evidence that Israel is very deliberate in their tactics of manipulation. What I can’t stand is how people like them and Trump make it a life mission to brow-beat the world into submission to their delusions of grandeur and get away with it. Well, for a while at least (Isa 66:3-4).
Notes:
- Some have speculated that this suggests that Trump initially assumed the Reiners were victims of one of Trump’s fanboy assassins out there—you know, the ones that are always making death threats on his enemies?—and he wanted to get ahead of the story to make excuse for what drove the guy so crazy. ↩︎
- Susie Wiles, his “Chief of Staff” recently confirmed this, that Trump seriously evaluates his hires based on “whose genes they have.” Such as Wiles herself, the daughter of sportscaster and one-time alcoholic Pat Summerall, with whom Trump shared a passion for football statistics. ↩︎
- As such, they exhibit the attitude of fascists everywhere who hate intellectual debate, since the only argument they have is the right of the powerful to dominate “the weak.” Like Goebbels said, “Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.” Inspirational. Preceding this tribal chief primitivism was the “No Nothing” movement of the 19th Century who didn’t want to encumbered by facts or having to learn anything. ↩︎
- For all of the trashing that Hollywood gets (and I’ve done plenty myself), one thing you can’t deny is the stunningly talented people this industry attracts from all over the world. Having lived here for 20 years, I still stand in awe of their abilities. ↩︎
- Of course, he wasn’t thrown to the ground, shot, strangled, disappeared, etc. Those tactics are only reserved for “violent libs.” Right-wingers, the real patriots, get to be what…coddled? Deep calleth unto deep I guess. ↩︎
- One-fourth of all Nobel Prize winners are Jewish, though they are a miniscule .2% of world population. ↩︎
- Deut 31:10-13. It was supposed to be done once every seven years, though Ezra may have made it annual to make it more effective. ↩︎
- It was actually an ever-evolving corruption of the Mosaic tradition. As such, you could argue that Jesus represented a conservative reaction to these liberalizing Pharisees, yet His substance was much more grace-oriented than their’s (Jn 1:17). ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishnah ↩︎
- Their authoritative documents didn’t stop with the Mishnah and Gemara either, but extended many centuries into the late medieval period, even though their authoritative statuses are all relative. ↩︎
- This is still the philosophy of many Jewish groups to this day, in spite of the obsessiveness of the Zionists. ↩︎
- This is why Emmanuel Kant, reputedly one of the brightest people to ever live, cynically characterized the Jewish people in his day as “a nation of swindlers.” ↩︎
- Both gnats and camels were “unclean” animals in Mosaic law to eat, but one obviously much bigger than the other. ↩︎
- Ardent one-time Zionist Dr. Israel Shahak, in his analysis of medieval Jewish history described those rabbi-dominated shetl communities as “one of the most closed of ‘closed societies’, one of the most totalitarian societies in the whole history of mankind,” quite a statement. Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (1994), second chapter. ↩︎
- A TV commentator mentioned about 600 Americans receiving some form of retribution for not sufficiently genuflecting to his memory. ↩︎
- Norm Finkelstein, a long-time critic of Israel, has said it’s become a “lunatic society,” especially ever since October 7. I know. Hamas knew they would go beserk. It was their exact strategy, to put the Israeli mindset on full display before the world. ↩︎
