My Man of the Year

by G. Murphy Donovan (January 2025)

 

 

Seeing isn’t believing. Believing is seeing. —Elf Judy

 

Donald J. Trump made the cover of Time Magazine for a second time in 2024. Trump’s second coming has been amazing and almost unprecedented. Nevertheless, he would not be my choice for man of the year.

Not yet.

Trump’s first election was as much of a surprise to Trump as it was to us. Indeed, nobody, least of all DJT could have anticipated the near universal resistance, if not sedition, right and left, inside the Beltway and in the federal establishment to Trump’s first term.

With little or no political resume, Trump took the brass ring in 2016 and the global establishment has yet to recover. Adding insult to imagined injury, Trump has now done the impossible twice.

Of such, mandates are made.

Let’s just call Trump’s first term a dry run, and call the Biden fiasco hence, a learning experience. Trump is older, let’s hope he is wiser about Beltway inertia and the DC culture in a deep (nee administrative) state still populated largely by tenured Civil Service apparatchiks and grieving, if not hostile, liberal Democrats.

The number one concern for the establishment, the media, and the administrative state at all levels is still Donald Trump himself, not any particular policy. Trump has now thumped two feckless women on the left. That fact alone is enough to make him a pariah midst an elite where toxic identity is everything. You can hardly watch or listen to a “news” broadcast today without some discussion of Trump’s personal foibles.

All this might change if team Trump delivers on just two promissory pragmatic issues, things that matter to all those “deplorables” who gave Trump a vote of confidence for a second time.

Withal, for maybe the first time in American history, policy will be articulated by a troika of successful, pragmatic businessmen; Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy. Guys, we might add, who made their bones making things, stuff that works. Thus the Trump promise is twofold. Implement policies that work and end wasteful programs that do not work.

Yes, it’s that simple.

If the 2025 Trump troika delivers on just those two generic aspirations, then Trump might be ‘man of the 21st Century.’

But for the moment, my man of 2024 is Benjamin Netanyahu.

No politician on the planet has done more for, not just Israel, but for the world in 2024. And no politician on the planet has suffered more abuse for doing the right thing in 2024. Israel is fighting a fight that the EU, NATO, and America should be waging.

Israel, a tiny enclave of less than seven million souls has taken on the Ummah, 50 million Arabs, and two billion Muslims.

Yes, the threat today is Islam, not just some amorphous independent gaggle of religious nutters.

Europe has already been suborned and colonized by Muslim zealots who have no interest in assimilation or nationalization. Religious law and autonomous “no-go” enclaves are already evident in Europe and throughout the Commonwealth. Indeed, with liberal immigration policies, and Muslim birth rates, political Islam has achieved demographic and cultural inroads in the West that could never have been achieved by force of arms.

The EU, NATO, and uncontrolled immigration might be the worst things to happen to Europe since Marx, Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler in tandem. With political fascism in the 20th Century, the West recognized the threat. At the moment, when confronted with an even more pernicious religious fascism, you hear nothing but crickets in London, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, and Sydney.

Withal, the real threat is Muslim sponsor states like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, the Emirates and others, without which Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, the Taliban, the PLO/PLA and the myriad of other global terror and propaganda proxies could not exist. The fight to eliminate Israel and intimidate the West with terror and immigration would dry on the vine overnight without Shite, Sunni, indeed Ummah sponsorship.

The global closet jihad is the worst kept secret of the 21st Century.

Ironically the only states that have dealt with Islamism with what we might politely call “realistic intolerance” are Israel, India, Russia, and China. Indeed, Beijing calls Islam a “social disease.”

Bingo!

And if ever India, Russia, and China find common cause to confront Ummah sponsored terror and sedition, rest assured that such coalition might make Gaza and Lebanon look like tempests in tea pots.

At the moment, America and Europe seem to have missed the strategic implications of jihad “diplomacy,” and the strategic seismic shift in Europe where the global left and the Islamist right now make common cause. The only question about the EU/Islamist bromance is who is buggering who. Thus far, NATO and the EU seem to have assumed the submissive, if not catamite, position on Mecca’s prayer rugs.

Good luck with that.

Alas, the heavy lifting in international affairs is always done by apathy. So for the moment, Israel and Netanyahu stand alone, for the most part, with a potent kinetic response to the jihad; doing what must be done in their neck of the woods. Israel, like no other nation, knows that neither freedom nor democracy is free.

Independence and sovereignty have always been expensive.

So my man of the year is Benjamin Netanyahu; besieged at home and abroad; yet still the right man, in the right place, at the right time. Bibi is not just humiliating a host of jihad proxies, but he has changed the entire strategic calculus in the Levant.

In the first instance, the two-state fiction has been consumed by the Hamas/PLO/PLA dumpster fire. And Syria, Turkey, and Iran must now be giving proxy war second thoughts. Israel has also set some markers for the rest of the civilized world on how they might have to deal with the jihad and Islamic religious fascism.

And of course now there is the Trump factor again.

So in closing, let’s just speculate and suggest that after 20 January, America will again be a true ally to Israel, not an ambiguous, addled scold that provides bullets and bombs laden with bullshit caveats and timid tactical advice. Israel, America, and indeed the civilized world all have a dog in the fight with Islamic terror and Muslim imperial colonialism.

To begin, if our Pentagon, our State Department, and NATO do not have the giblets to get in the fray; let’s make sure that Israel has all it needs to win their fight.

Whither Israel, so go we all.

 

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G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of Intelligence and national security. Follow him on X.

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