During Donald Trump’s first four years in the White House, the stranger to Washington’s infernal ways got nothing done: That cabal of various Deep State appendages — the Democratic Party’s upper echelons, the intelligence apparatus, the Justice Department and the F.B.I., and corporate media — made sure of that.
Trump seems to have thought this through during his four years playing golf at Mar-a–Lago. He returned to the White House two months ago this week with a full-dress plan to get done what he couldn’t first time around.
And now look. Donald Trump the subverted, we have to conclude, was better than Donald Trump the empowered. Who’d’a thunk it? The more Trump does this time around the more one looks back with a weird fondness to the subterfuge of the Trump I regime, unlawful and corrosive of our ailing republic as all that was.
Simplicius, the always stimulating commentator who takes his name from the sixth century Neoplatonist, posted an interesting summation of the present state of affairs the other day. “Trump,” he wrote, “now wallows in a post-euphoric doldrums phase of his floundering second term, when virtually every one of his campaign promises has faltered or flopped.”
Floundering presidents tend to make messes. The mess to which Simplicius refers concerns the Ukraine war and Washington’s relations with Moscow. Ending the former and repairing the latter was the biggest of Trump’s many big promises during last year’s campaign season.
Trump has been all over the place on this key question. The man who stood squarely against the war has now resumed supplying Ukraine with weapons and battlefield intelligence. This past week he had Marco Rubio, who comes over more as a schoolboy than a secretary of state, offering Moscow a ceasefire deal with the Kiev regime as if — one either laughs or does the other thing — the U.S. is the honest broker rather than the principal belligerent in the proxy war former President Joe Biden recklessly provoked.
It is the same wherever one looks — north to Canada, south to Mexico, across the Atlantic to Europe, across the Pacific to China. Altering the direction of policy is one thing, very often what is warranted; creating crises is another, and usually the mark of diplomatic incompetence.
Tariffs that have people recalling the consequences of the Smoot–Hawley Act back in the 1930s, relations with Beijing drifting from tension to hostility, the silly talk of owning Greenland, invading Mexico, repossessing the Panama Canal, and on and on: It is tempting to say Trump is starting to make Joe Biden look good — a feat that would surpass all men’s believing.
But no, we must turn to Israel and the Zionists’ campaign of terror against the Palestinians of Gaza and now the West Bank. And as we do we must forget about anyone making Joe Biden look good — not now, not in the histories yet to be written.
Taking Over From Biden on Israel
With the Israelis Trump is not floundering. He is picking up just where his genocidal predecessor left off and so getting done exactly what he wants. The two of them are just the same as they face “the Jewish state.” Just as Joe Biden was, Trump is acutely careful never to put a foot wrong with the Zionists.
Steven Witkoff, Trump’s “special envoy” in West Asia — in real life another property developer from New York with no apparent idea of how to conduct diplomacy — supposedly brokered a multi-phased ceasefire between Israel and Hamas soon after Trump took office. I say “supposedly” because we do not know what transpired between Witkoff and the Israelis and we may never. We have an official account with curb appeal for Trump as he poses as statesman for peace.
Since then Witkoff has organized — let’s stay with “supposedly,” as Tel Aviv probably dictated its terms — a seven-week extension of this first phase just as the second phase was due to start. This is not diplomacy, in my read: It is sequenced choreography.
Net: Trump’s man got a ceasefire signed, then arranged for its breach as the Israelis openly plan to resume their campaign of terror. It only looks like floundering, as I say.
Israel has resumed blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza, this time water as well as food, tents and other essentials to survival. I read over the weekend that Israel is now preventing record numbers of doctors and aid workers from entering the Strip.
From the White House in response to these straight-out war crimes: No sound.
Over the weekend Trump authorized large-scale airstrikes against Yemen; Reuters reports this is the most extensive U.S. military operation since Trump assumed office. Trump, you will recall, once opposed America’s military escapades abroad. Yemen, you will also recall, is one theater in the “seven-front war” to which Bibi Netanyahu committed Israel last year.
I think of these things and then think of the numerous reports we have had over many months that Trump accepted $100 million during his 2024 political campaign from Miriam Adelson, who carries on the arch–Zionist activities of her late husband. Trump’s ties — his debts, indeed — to the Adelsons and other Israel-über-alles obsessives like them lie beyond question.
And lately I think of something else — something it is time we all thought more about.
Mahmoud Khalil & the Attack on Universities
I know few people who have not been shocked by the arrest without charge — there being nothing to charge — of Mahmoud Khalil, the recent graduate of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, S.I.P.A., and the spokesman of those who have demonstrated against Israel’s genocide and America’s support of it this past year. Those who stand for the Palestinian cause, constitutional lawyers, ordinarily toothless media commentators: All view Khalil’s detention and the Trump administration’s plan to deport him as egregiously over the line.
The Khalil arrest is part of a full-scale attack on Columbia and the opening shot of a campaign against numerous other universities. Trump cut off $400 million in established government grants more or less simultaneously as Immigration and Customs cops stuffed Khalil into a van weekend before last.
The New York Times ran a curious commentary on Trump’s now-obvious blitz against higher education in its Sunday editions. Meghan O’Rourke lectures in English at Yale. This is the pith of the argument she makes under the headline, “The End of the University as We Know It”:
“What is really happening here is an attack on the American faith in knowledge as a value and a public good that has served us well….
If the battle over universities were only about budgets, the fight might be different. But what is being targeted is something more profound: the ability of institutions to sustain the freedoms that form the foundation of our democracy.”
Meghan O’Rourke speaks the truth but not the whole truth. Trump’s operation against America’s institutions of higher learning, while it has a lengthy history among conservatives, is prompted by this administration’s obsession with anti–Semitism — I mean “anti–Semitism,” to be clear. This is the obsession Zionists have purposely cultivated for decades; Trump, with his Adelson money and his indulgence of Israeli terror, merely brings this to a new phase of aggression.
Not once does Meghan O’Rourke mention this, not once the Khalil case. Meghan O’Rourke is effectively a symptom of precisely the advanced cancer she declines to name.
While I was contemplating, along with many, many others, the grossly unjust case of Mahmoud Khalil and all that lies behind it, a report that caused my jaw to collide with the edge of my desk arrived from MintPress News. This was Alan MacLeod’s piece under the headline, “Professor at Center of Columbia University Deportation Scandal Is Former Israeli Spy.” It appeared three days after Khalil was taken from his apartment near Columbia.
In an instant, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil acquired vast new depths of implication. MacLeod has a habit of adding ballast to reported events in this way: He is among the best investigative journalists now publishing in independent media.
He writes in part:
“Dr. Keren Yarhi–Milo, the Columbia dean at the center of the university’s student purge, is a former Israeli military intelligence officer. Now, she stands accused of helping orchestrate the deportation of a Palestinian student leader and silencing campus dissent against Israel’s war on Gaza….
Khalil’s dean, … head of the School of International and Public Affairs, is a former Israeli military intelligence officer and official at Israel’s Mission to the United Nations. Yarhi–Milo played a significant role in drumming up public concern about a supposed wave of intolerable anti-Semitism sweeping over the campus, thereby laying the groundwork for the extensive crackdown on civil liberties that has followed the protests.”
It is a long, detailed piece, thoroughly reported, and it caused me to think yet again. How did a former I.D.F. officer on the intelligence side find her way to directing Columbia’s equivalent of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard? O.K., Israeli spookery to the Israeli Mission to the U.N. is a plausible progression. But how did Yarhi–Milo get from there to Columbia’s S.I.P.A.? What could have been the journey?
MacLeod links usefully to one of those puff pieces alumni magazines publish about illustrious graduates, in this case The Owl. Therein we read that the young Yarhi–Milo, raised outside Tel Aviv, read Columbia’s course catalog the way other girls her age read The Bobbsey Twins.
While at the U.N. Mission, she applied to S.I.P.A. and the dean soon afterward called her. In a subsequent interview, Yarhi–Milo reported, “We completely hit it off.” They had “a deep conversation,” and the spook-cum-aspiring scholar was accepted.
Happens all the time, of course. I was for a time a graduate student at S.I.P.A., and I am here to tell you I never had a call from the dean and never had a deep conversation with anyone other than my faculty adviser.
You get the drift here, I trust. By all available evidence, and with my bullshit detectors just back from the shop, this is a too-cute cover story apparently intended to gloss the appointment of a Zionist plant atop a major institution at a major American university.
As Alan MacLeod makes perfectly plain, Yarhi–Milo has acted in behalf of the Zionist cause since her arrival at S.I.P.A. six years ago. She has, indeed, tacitly approved of Khalil’s arrest, having made — his dean for heaven’s sake — no comment since he was forcibly detained.
Donald Trump is the all-to-public measure of how Zionists have penetrated the very highest levels of the U.S. government. This phenomenon is not new, of course. Trump will now serve to demonstrate the extent to which the countless appendages of the Zionist cause demand America sacrifice itself — its institutions, its laws, its very intelligence — to protect the barbarities of “the Jewish state” from criticism.
The journey of Keren Yarhi–Milo from an Israeli intelligence unit to the top of a leading American institution of higher learning tells us something else. The insidious penetration of Zionists into the very fabric of American life is very extensive, incalculably so. It would be difficult to overstate the consequences of this reality — the corruptions, the compromises, the duplicities, the degradations to which our polity is subjected.
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