Unmask Donald Trump

If President Biden knows Trump and his henchmen are sabotaging U.S. foreign policy for partisan gain, he should let the American public know before the election.

(Photo by Daniel Jayo/Getty Images)

President Biden may have reached his wits end, however belatedly, with Benjamin Netanyahu. A readout of their most recent conversation suggests that, in the wake of the World Central Kitchen killings, and the subsequent flight-to-safety of humanitarian workers, U.S. aid will be conditioned going forward on a rapidly implemented ceasefire (of uncertain length) in order to meliorate the catastrophe on the ground.

But Biden’s larger picture goal—and perhaps the only way to lastingly tie this Israeli government’s hands—is a grand settlement, along the lines he’s been negotiating, that would sweeten the deal for Israel by normalizing its relations with Saudi Arabia. 

He should thus be alarmed at the news (if it is indeed news to him) that Trump has held at least one undisclosed phone call with Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, in recent days. 

Trump has been strangely at pains of late to imply that he is at odds with the rest of his party, which lusts for bloody retribution against Palestinians. He recently told a duo of right-wing Israeli journalists, “You have to finish up your war,” and stressed the same thing to the Republican apparatchik Hugh Hewitt, insisting in his television-addled way that Israel is “absolutely losing the PR war.”

On its face, that suggests agreement with Biden. If we could ever take Trump at face value or trust his motives, his private contacts with MBS might not be so worrisome. There is speculation and reporting to suggest that Trump views Netanyahu as disloyal for having congratulated President Biden on winning the 2020 election—perhaps this is his retribution? And he may see some advantage in getting caught advocating for Israel to end its war, so that he might claim credit if a ceasefire materializes in the coming weeks.

But the clear optimum for him—what is in his best interest, the only interest he cares about—is to scuttle Biden’s efforts to reach a grand diplomatic settlement in the region. And between his secret conversations, his private business arrangements with Saudi royals, and his control over Republicans in Congress, he almost certainly has the clout required to subvert U.S. foreign policy in this way. Just as he’s subverted Biden’s Ukraine policy and border-security negotiations for personal gain.  

He’s also not necessarily working alone. We learned this week that Netanyahu hosted Jared Kushner for dinner in December, and that Trump treats his degenerate former national-security henchman Richard Grenell as an “envoy” to right-wing leaders abroad. 

What’s more likely: that Trump is Biden’s earnest partner seeking an end to the war in Gaza? Or that he would like to create that impression domestically, while working behind the scenes to prolong it? Biden shouldn’t just wonder if Trump and his lackeys are collectively up to no good. He should suspect it. And insofar as he has access to information that confirms his suspicion, he should reveal it to the American public.

FOOLS ROLLED

Trump represents both continuity and schism with the GOP’s status quo ante. The debate over whether it’s one or the other, or to what extent it’s both, is by now fairly tired. But in this case we can see both aspects at once. No pre-Trump Republicans were so openly in bed with and personally-compromised by foreign oligarchs, and none of them would’ve been so audacious in their subversive efforts. 

But recent history is also thick with successful GOP efforts to undermine U.S. foreign policy, while out of power, for partisan advantage. Enough partisan advantage to turn elections. 

Richard Nixon’s secret, illegal diplomacy may have helped scuttle South Vietnamese participation in peace negotiations, prefiguring five more years of war. But he got elected!

Ronald Reagan staved off the release of U.S. hostages from the embassy in Tehran so that he, rather than Jimmy Carter, could claim credit for freeing them. And he got elected!

Donald Trump solicited and abetted Russian cybercrimes against Hillary Clinton and her campaign, with both public and private entreaties. Some of the crimes were successful. And he got elected!

In the Nixon case, as in Trump’s, the U.S. government was clearly aware of the illicit ties and motives. But in both cases, officials talked themselves out of reacting in the moment. The Obama administration, perhaps under the impression that Clinton was poised to win, said almost nothing before the election. By the time more of the truth came out, it was too late. After tying Nixon directly to the peace-talk betrayal, Nixon biographer John Farrell wrote, “Johnson’s closest aides urged him to unmask Nixon’s actions. But on a Nov. 4 conference call, they concluded that they could not go public because, among other factors, they lacked the ‘absolute proof,’ as Defense Secretary Clark Clifford put it, of Nixon’s direct involvement. Nixon was elected president the next day.”

As the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me three times, I’m sensing a pattern here, fool me four times maybe I deserve to lose. 

REGRETS, WE’VE HAD A FEW

And here, in round four, the political implications are obvious. If Biden can announce an end to the war in Gaza, pursuant to a grand bargain in the region, he will almost certainly get a measurable bump in the polls. His base is irreconcilably divided over the war, but the factions can find unity in peace, and any effort Trump makes to claim credit for himself will ring hollow to just about everyone outside his base. That’s why his interests are best served by privately dragging out the status quo, even if publicly he claims to want the war to end.

It’d be nice to be wrong—if Trump was not, for once, engaged in acts of extraordinary corruption, if not outright felony, to advance his personal interests. 

But if I’m right, and Biden can substantiate it, it’d be astonishingly stupid of him to sit on the information. After all this time, after all we’ve lived through.

It’s worth expressing the point more broadly: It’s astonishingly stupid at this point for anyone with the legitimate power to expose Trump, or deter him from cheating, to sit on their hands. We should all be snake-bit by misguided fealty to rules that mean nothing if both parties don’t abide by them. We should discard as self-sabotaging neurosis the view that people will be madder at Democrats for exposing deception than for the cheating itself.  

This is why Obama and his national security team should have exposed the Russia plot, or what they knew of it, before the election. With perfect hindsight, would he really have done the same thing?

It’s why Judge Juan Merchan, presiding over Trump’s criminal hush-money trial, should enforce his gag order against Trump now that Trump has violated it.

This fear of protecting their own self-interest bears family resemblance to Democrats’ unwillingness to encourage Justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire while their party controls the White House and Senate. 

It’s a mindset problem. And it’s why Biden should listen to party wisemen like Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin, and liberal gadflies like me, and let the public know what the government knows about Trump’s betrayals in real time. As Raskin told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent this week, “It would be good to know if we could fill in the blanks in terms of the very specific commitments that he's making right now. And he has emissaries who are traveling all over the world making common cause with right-wing governments. And those people are doing everything they can to try to make Donald Trump look good."

When Ezra Klein wrote his much-discussed audio essay calling on Biden to step aside, he rightly wondered how much regret Democratic operatives would live with if Biden goes on to lose in November. “I have this nightmare that Trump wins in 2024,” he worried, “and then in 2025 and 2026, out come the campaign tell-all books, and they’re full of emails and WhatsApp messages between Biden staffers and Democratic leaders, where they’re all saying to each other, this is a disaster, he’s not going to win this, I can’t bear to watch this speech, we’re going to lose. But they didn’t say any of it publicly, they didn’t do anything, because it was too dangerous for their careers, or too uncomfortable given their loyalty to Biden.”

Maybe Ezra’s broader call was wrong (I think it was at least premature) but that sentiment is dead on and important and relevant here. If you’re a Biden national security aide with high clearance, and you know Trump’s angle, and you sit on the information, and Trump wins, how will you feel about your decision on November 6?