Trump’s presidency is worse than we predicted. We knew that he did not know much about how our government operates and that he knew even less about how international relations work, making it almost impossible for him to do a good job.
George Will, that reliably conservative columnist, told us that not only did Mr. Trump know nothing, “he does not know what it is to know.” However, despite—or maybe because of—these limitations, he is moving us to the brink of war with his actions, and he is doing so for flimsy reasons and against the advice of knowledgeable and experienced experts, at home and abroad.
Many of us had thought Trump would be an embarrassment to many Americans for his activities in office. But while his behavior has certainly been embarrassing, things are getting much worse than that. He is putting the world in danger.
He pulled the United States out of the climate control agreement for the benefit of the oil industry and to the detriment to the rest of the world. Perhaps even worse is that some of his other actions seriously destabilized the Middle East.
First, in an unbelievably crass move, he named his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as the diplomat to bring peace in the Middle East. Since Kushner had no qualifications for that role, it showed that either Trump was ignorant of international relations or cared very little about pursuing peace—or both.
Then, despite the pleadings of the major allies of the United States—Britain, France, Germany—Trump did as promised and pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal. The list of world leaders who think that is a good idea is short indeed.
In future international negotiations, other countries will tend not to trust America to uphold its end of the deal, as it did not do so in the Iran agreement. Trump claimed that Iran was violating the deal when all the evidence showed otherwise. Trump’s actions immediately unleashed battles between Iran and Israel in Syria.
To further inflame the Middle East, this week Trump moved the United States’ Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thus supporting the claim of hard-line Israelis to that city. Never mind that Jerusalem, one of the oldest cities in the world, is considered holy by the three major Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. During the first day of demonstrations Israeli security forces killed over 50 Palestinian protesters.
For years the city has been claimed by both Israelis and Palestinians. However, in one fell swoop, Trump functionally handed the city to Israel, and the United States lost its role as a peacemaker. The Palestinians will no longer take part in peace negotiations that involve the United States. He has upended years of careful diplomacy by Democrats and Republicans alike, again for the flimsiest of reasons.
A key group of Americans pushing for the Embassy to be moved to Jerusalem is so-called Christian Evangelicals. This group has already disgraced itself among many people not in the Christian Right by enthusiastically supporting Trump despite his very well-known moral failures, thus damaging what they are supposedly trying to advance—Christian values and beliefs.
But why would the evangelicals favor Israel when many of them believe that Jews cannot go to heaven when they die? Maybe it’s because some have the belief that the “end times” require Jews to be in Israel for the Christian Messiah to return. At that time, as some of them have explained to me, Jews can be converted and saved.
These are strange times indeed. For example, a Christian Right minister, Robert Jeffries, who said Jews are going to hell, led the prayer at the Jerusalem Embassy opening. Another Christian Right minister, John Hagee, who once said that Hitler was a part of God’s plan for Israel, gave the closing benediction.
We are in strange and perilous times, times when expertise, experience, and common sense are not present in some very important policy decisions.