A Betrayal for the Ages: As the Biden Administration Turns on Israel, the Trump Campaign Begins To Look Like a Juggernaut

By Conrad Black

Almost every week there is accumulating evidence that the decline of the Biden reelection campaign is accelerating. As the Biden polls deteriorate, the administration, instead of making policy course corrections that could be assumed to improve the president’s appeal to traditional Democratic voters, is doubling down on positions on which it knows the country disapproves.

Outwardly they profess confidence that they can mobilize public fear of what they describe as MAGA extremism, even though there is nothing extreme about it, or they are like Goldwater Republicans in 1964, knowing they will lose the election but are playing the long game and angling for ultimate control of their party.

In the last week, the administration bungled the issue of the uninformed anti-Israeli unrest at American university campuses by trying to duck the issue spuriously hiding behind the right to demonstrate. The country is disgusted with the cost of university tuition and the trillion dollars of student debt, disgusted with the anti-American brainwashing that goes on in many American universities.

It is also disgusted with graduating millions of people in fields where they cannot possibly make a living, and those who look into it at all are disgusted by the bloated inefficiency and extravagance of most university administrations. No rational person can fail to be disgusted also by the spectacle of mobs of hooligans masquerading as students invading and vandalizing campuses on behalf of the Hamas authors of the invasion and massacres in Israel on October 7.

The administration has similarly made a feeble attempt to disguise what amounts to the alignment of the United States with Hamas in the present conflict in Gaza. Israel made an offer to Hamas that the Secretary Blinken described as “incredibly generous,” which Hamas rejected peremptorily and Israel returned to the offensive at Rafah. It immediately became clear that the American and Hamas positions are substantially aligned

Namely, America views the hostages as a means to force Israel to concede Hamas’s legitimacy and permanent right to exist as a terrorist state refusing to recognize the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state. The end of the war America envisions, like Hamas, is with thousands more terrorists liberated in exchange for the 132 hostages still captive, with an American guarantee that Israel will not produce its combat operations in Gaza.

Americans should understand that this essentially means that the United States is prepared to guarantee the survival of Hamas as the government of Gaza and as the stated objective of Israel was to eliminate Hamas as a terrorist force while Hamas has declared survival to be victory. The United States is now effectively a partisan of Hamas victory and Israeli defeat.

This is the logical conclusion of the original Obama policy of appeasing Iran and implicitly considering Israel to be dispensable. Yet it is a terrible strategic error, and it is a betrayal for the ages. America, more than most countries, has ample reason to oppose terrorism and the prior commitment of the United States to the legitimacy and survival of Israel as a Jewish state has been a central point of American foreign policy from the founding of that state during the Truman administration in 1948.

It is impossible to detect that there has been any comprehensive analysis that has led to this policy change by the Biden administration. It appears, like almost everything else in this administration, to have been adopted as a policy reactively after a series of shifts and turns caused a clumsy recalibration brd on a desperate administrations ambition not to alienate Islamic votes in Michigan and Minnesota in this year’s presidential election.

It is shaming and will be seen as shaming by tens of millions of Americans that the administration appears effectively to have jettisoned Israel, a heroic nation and an outstanding success story, to appease the most odious terrorist organization in the world and the principal supply of cannon fodder for the terrorist pseudo-theocracy in Iran.

This U-turn by the Biden administration is particularly depressing as it appears to have been largely authored by the CIA director, William Burns. A career diplomat and intelligence officer and well-respected former ambassadorial in Moscow, Mr. Burns has generally been seen as the strongest player on the Biden strategic team.

For him to lead such an initiative is indicative of the fact that on this question the entire administration has simply caved, turned its back on America’s friends and interests as well as on its mortal enemies, and is simply running away. It is a pitiful performance and is widely seen to be so, no less by America’s enemies than by its friends.

Unless the position of the administration deteriorates so severely in the next three months that the powers that be in the Democratic Party force the president and vice president not to seek reelection and parachute in as replacements personalities untainted by the succession of debacles of this administration, their only remaining hope is to steal the election with unverified harvested ballots and unscrutinized voting-counting procedures.

Even the New York Times-Siena poll puts President Trump ahead in all the battleground states, except for Wisconsin, by more than the margin of error, and Mr. Trump’s improved fundraising efforts and his ever larger rallies — more than 100,000 at Wildwood, New Jersey on Saturday — all indicate that the universal truism that this is a close election may be evaporating. It is starting to show the character of a Trump landslide.

The former winning card of the Democrats — the contemptible and unconstitutional legal offensive — has like so many others of their stratagems, disintegrated, this time in the absurdity of how the egregious New York district attorney, Alvin Bragg, bungled presentation of his attempt to aggregate two dubious and time-barred misdemeanors into a felony.

With less than six months to the election, the Trump campaign is starting to gain the scale and the velocity of an unstoppable juggernaut. Three years ago, the anti-Trump press was celebrating his demise and wildly celebrating an alleged insurrection. Two years ago, anti-Trump commentators were urging Republicans to stop being afraid of Trump and to emancipate their party from him.

One year ago, the outrageous lawfare offensive was underway and a busy group of Republican challengers for the nomination was being unveiled. Mr. Trump batted them away like flies without even condescending to debate and is now leading all the polls except, (inevitably), that of the National Public Radio-Public Broadcasting System. Although anything can happen in six months, this is a powerful trend and one the Democrats have richly earned.

First published in the New York Sun