Cognitive Dissonance

“Trump the Peacemaker” vs. “Trump the Authoritarian”

A lot of people seem to have difficulty holding these two concepts in their minds at the same time, as if one negates the other. They don’t, and it can be demoralizing to believe that one is more “real” than the other, or that if you praise Trump the peacemaker you must be implying that Trump the authoritarian isn’t so bad – or maybe there’s even something even good about what he’s doing domestically.

These two statements are absolutely true and are taking place at the same time and in the same universe, both moral and cosmic:

Trump is principally responsible for the apparent end of Israel’s Gaza War. (I will even go further and say this is shaping up to be the best chance at eventual Israeli-Palestinian peace since Oslo – perhaps even better than Oslo – but that’s a separate discussion).

Trump is doing his best to destroy the American constitutional system of checks and balances and reduce the US to an authoritarian semi-dictatorship. (To see an impressively complete listing of Trump’s sins against American constitutional practice see MJ Rosenberg’s Oct. 13 substack post.)

I do not know (or at the moment care) if Trump has malign intentions in his 20 point “peace plan.” What is important is that he is the first American president in decades (perhaps since Dwight Eisenhower) to strong-arm an Israeli prime minister into doing something he very much did not want to do. To be precise, he forced Bibi Netanyahu into agreeing to stop the Gaza war and will not let him start it again. Moreover, he made him sign and pretend to like a document including mention of an (admittedly aspirational) Palestinian state and a number of other ideas and policies he absolutely abhors. To be sure, Bibi appeared to embrace the document with every fiber of his being. He’s not called the “magician” for nothing.

None of us knows exactly why or how Trump successfully manipulated his power as president so that when he said “jump,” Bibi jumped. I imagine Trump is assuming he and his friends will profit from it but I very much doubt that was the main reason he made it happen. Rather, along with all the narcissism, brutality, stupidity, and many other traits catalogued by his opponents over the last ten years, he appears to possess an impulse against war. And we are lucky that he has activated that impulse in this instance – and we should be grateful for it. I hope Trump stays focused and continues to hold Bibi’s – and Israel’s - feet to the fire as long as necessary.

None of that has any bearing on the absolute and urgent necessity of opposing the rest of his program with maximum energy. And if the two poles come into conflict at some point – well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Nor does that mean that Trump is a better person than his predecessor, who wasn’t able to pressure Bibi for whatever reason, because he’s not. Nor that he is an “ally,” or “not so bad,” or that “there’s some good in him.” There will be plenty of time when he’s gone from politics or from the world to psychoanalyze or otherwise dissect his presidency and his character.

But no one who cares about preserving our democracy should waste any time on trying to align these two elements of “Trumpism,” if there is such a thing. To paraphrase what has long become a cliché, we must support Trump’s peace plan as if he’s no autocrat, and oppose his autocracy as if he were no peacemaker. And a necessary coda: If his peace plan goes off the rails or becomes something other than peace and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians, then that must be opposed as well.

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