Textbook.
During the campaign, you brag about how you’re going to make America right with Israel again. You’ll rip up the Iran nuclear deal. Move the embassy to Jerusalem. Let the settlements grow.
Then you’re elected. Your secretary of defense says America has to live up to its word on the Iran deal. Move the embassy? Maybe not.
You tell Netanyahu to hold off on the settlements. Like maybe they’re part of the problem.
Your first meeting with a Middle East leader turns out to be not Bibi but King Abdullah of Jordan. At the Prayer Breakfast.
Then Bibi comes to town. You call in the press.
Message 1: You’re pals. Message 2: He’s going to have to compromise. Message 3: Two states? One state? Whatever.
Message 4: You don’t do anti-Semitism talk.
Message 4 eats up all the other messages. Another day, another press conference.
You channel Nixon: “I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life.” Dude, no one called you an anti-Semite.
The story rolls on, through President’s Day weekend. Even your Jewish sycophants — your Jack Rosens and your Mort Kleins — can’t cough up words to defend you.
On Monday, another round of threatening phone calls comes in to Jewish community centers. Tombstones are desecrated in St. Louis.
Your deputy press secretary reads a condemnation. Your Jew-by-choice daughter tweets that ours is a nation built on tolerance (#JCC).
Six days after the Bibi press conference you go on MSNBC and say anti-Semitism is horrible. You visit the National Museum of African-American History and Culture and call the JCC threats horrible and painful and “a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil.”
The reaction in the community: too little, too late.
The head of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect is like, all you’ve done is “put a Band-Aid on the cancer of anti-Semitism” that has infected your administration. Ouch.
Your press secretary complains that no matter how many times you talk about it “it’s never good enough.”
Heckuva job, Spicey.
But it was you who managed to turn an easy question into a week-long carnival.
Textbook.
