Analysis | Trump recenters the violence in Israel on himself – The Washington Post

What Trump told Ravid, though, was that he was disappointed in Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not taking a more active role in the attack.

“I was very disappointed in Israel having to do with that event,” Trump told Ravid. He added, “People will be hearing about that at the right time.”

The right time, it seems, was during a campaign speech in Florida a few days after Israel suffered its most damaging attack in decades.

Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump

On Wednesday night, Trump spoke to Club 47, a group centered on returning him to the White House. Meandering off-script, he told the audience about the Soleimani strike in typically bellicose terms. And then his tangent took a tangent.

“I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down,” he said, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “That was a very terrible thing, I will say that. So when I see sometimes the intelligence — you talk about the intelligence or you talk about some of the things that went wrong over the last week, they’ve got to straighten it out.”

The implication there isn’t subtle: Trump is suggesting that the intelligence failure that allowed Hamas to push past barriers and enter Israel was a failure on Netanyahu’s part. He’d gotten Soleimani wrong and now this, too.

“We did the job ourself, and it was absolute precision, magnificent, beautiful job,” Trump added a bit later. “And then Bibi tried to take credit for it. That didn’t make me feel too good! But that’s all right.”

By now, no observer of American politics should take Trump’s assertions at face value. When Trump first flirted with criticizing Netanyahu in his conversation with Ravid, the reporter pointed to comments from the Israeli government suggesting that it had sought a more active role. Contemporaneous reporting indicated that Israel made it possible for Soleimani’s cellphone to be tracked, allowing him to be geolocated.

But there’s another consideration to include here. In a separate article, Ravid crystallized another facet of Trump’s anger at the Israeli leader: Netanyahu was one of the first to congratulate Joe Biden on his 2020 victory. He did so soon after the race was called — but well before Trump acknowledged his defeat (which, of course, he’s never done). In offering that congratulation, Trump told Ravid, Netanyahu “made a terrible mistake.”

The Associated Press’s Jonathan Lemire spoke to someone close to Trump and reported Thursday morning that Trump’s attack in West Palm Beach was triggered in part by Netanyahu’s having offered praise for President Biden.

The riff on the Israeli leader wasn’t the only questionable claim Trump made in his Club 47 speech. At another point, he offered a compliment to the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah with which Soleimani was linked. (The attack on Israel was carried out by Hamas, although fighting also flared up between Israel and Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon.)

“Hezbollah is very smart,” Trump said. “They’re all very smart.” He acknowledged that this was an atypical assertion from an American politician, and he predicted that it would yield an outcry similar to when he praised Chinese autocrat Xi Jinping. But he repeated it anyway: “Hezbollah, they’re very smart.”

Why would he say this? It fits with his pattern of casting his perceived foes as endlessly wily and capable — meaning that, in vanquishing them, he’s wilier and more capable still. Only Trump, America’s most capable defender, can hold off the devious geniuses of Hezbollah. Of course, there’s also the fact that Trump deals only in superlatives, so his description of Hezbollah included hyping it up. And, while these comments came well before those he made about Netanyahu, the comment also positions the Israeli leader as potentially in over his head against his opponents.

Just after his criticism of Netanyahu, Trump made his most dubious Israel-related assertion of the evening.

“The recent terror attacks are also a reminder of the deadly dangers that we face from Joe Biden’s demolition of our own borders here on American soil,” he said. “Under Biden, the same people that attacked Israel — killing, raping, torturing and maiming innocent civilians — are right now pouring into our once-beautiful U.S.A.” He used the term “once-beautiful,” he said, because of how the country had declined since he left office.

This is a deeply telling quote, one that appeared to come directly from the teleprompter. He came prepared to assert that immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are comparable to armed Hamas militants storming into Israel, a declaration that is, of course, indefensible.

Since he embarked on his bid for the presidency in 2016, Trump has made unsupported claims about immigrants to stoke the fears of his supporters and, again, cast himself as their sole defender. As he pushed for funding to build a wall on the southern border, he and his administration made repeated, untrue claims about terrorists slipping into the United States to wreak havoc. Five-plus years later, it seems, the terrorists are still biding their time.

But, again, it’s not hard to unpack Trump’s thinking. Israel saw militants cross a barrier and carry out horrible acts against innocent civilians. Why not suggest that something similar is underway in South Texas? Of course, Trump went further, suggesting that the “same people” who attacked Israel were coming into the United States — meaning, presumably, members of Hamas. There is no evidence of that being the case.

What happened in Israel was a horror and one that remains unresolved. For Trump, it also was an opportunity, a chance to position his candidacy and exact revenge on someone he perceived as having wronged him. Even though the attack on Israel isn’t about him, Trump did his best to make it about Trump.