Former President Donald Trump said that Israel needs to “finish what they started” and “get it over with fast,” as he continued arguing Israel was “losing the PR war” because of the visuals coming out of Gaza.
“You’ve got to get it over with, and you have to get back to normalcy. And I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it, because you’ve got to have victory. You have to have a victory, and it’s taking a long time,” Trump said in an interview with The Hugh Hewitt Show that aired Thursday.
Trump defended comments he made recently in an interview with Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, in which he said Israel needed to “finish up” its war with Hamas and that the country was “losing a lot of support” among the world. One of the Israeli journalists who conducted the interview later wrote that Trump’s comments “shocked us deeply” and argued both Trump and President Joe Biden were “turning their rhetorical backs on Israel.”
“What I said very plainly is get it over with, and let’s get back to peace and stop killing people. And that’s a very simple statement. Get it over with. They’ve got to finish what they finish. They have to get it done. Get it over with, and get it over with fast, because we have to, you have to get back to normalcy and peace,” Trump told The Hugh Hewitt Show.
Trump noted, “They’ve got to finish what they started, and they’ve got to finish it fast, and we have to get on with life.”
Donald Trump issued one of his periodic official statements, expressing his regret about the course of Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine. He did not use the name Putin.
Nor, for that matter, did he use the word attack. Instead, Trump framed the invasion as a problem the two countries have tragically failed to work out together.
This remarkable construction deserves closer analysis, but first it’s worth understanding the context. Trump infamously described Putin as a “genius” for massing troops on Ukraine’s border. He has repeatedly declined efforts by allies such as Sean Hannity to coax him into condemning the invasion.
His official statements have followed a handful of familiar themes. Russia’s invasion is Joe Biden’s fault (“Putin is playing Biden like a drum!”). Trump strengthened NATO (“I hope everyone is able to remember that it was me, as President of the United States, that got delinquent NATO members to start paying their dues, which amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars”).
But the most peculiar aspect is Trump’s habit of using the passive voice. That is not a construction he employs frequently, but in this case, it serves his purpose of presenting Russia’s invasion as if it were a natural disaster — a tragedy that occurred naturally with no author or source of blame. He has used this device repeatedly.
February 22: “If properly handled, there was absolutely no reason that the situation currently happening in Ukraine should have happened at all.”
February 24: “If I were in Office, this deadly Ukraine situation would never have happened!”
March 1: “The RINOs, Warmongers, and Fake News continue to blatantly lie and misrepresent my remarks on Putin because they know this terrible war being waged against Ukraine would have never happened under my watch … There should be no war waging now in Ukraine, and it is terrible for humanity that Biden, NATO, and the West have failed so terribly in allowing it to start.”
March 15: “Now with what’s going on with Russia and Ukraine, among many other things, the great and wonderful people of Hungary need the continued strong leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orban more than ever.” (Note that, among the NATO countries, Orbán has taken a uniquely pro-Russia stance. So Trump’s argument that “what’s going on with Russia and Ukraine” makes his election more important directly implies that Orbán’s refusal to support NATO’s response to the invasion makes him more valuable.)
Only once did Trump use an active-voice construction to identify Russia as the aggressor (“If the Election wasn’t Rigged … Russia would not have attacked Ukraine”). On every other occasion, he has relied on verbal contortions to mask its author.
Other Republican leaders have used direct language to describe the invasion. Mitch McConnell (“Putin’s initial aggression was just a small foretaste of what this thug had planned for Ukraine. Now we are watching his full brutality unfold”) and Kevin McCarthy (“Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is reckless and evil. The United States stands with the people of Ukraine and prays for their safety and resolve. Putin’s actions must be met with serious consequence”) have not felt the need to dance around Putin’s culpability.
Trump’s latest statement goes beyond this familiar passive voice and wonders openly why both countries have failed to settle their differences. “It doesn’t make sense that Russia and Ukraine aren’t sitting down and working out some kind of an agreement,” he muses, which would be true if you were starting from the premise that neither country intended to destroy the other. If you begin with the premise that Russia set out to subjugate its neighbor and Ukraine merely wishes to coexist peacefully, then the lack of diplomatic progress makes perfect sense.
Not long ago, Donald Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” In a followup tweet he specifically referenced the “Second Amendment.” His deranged supporters apparently heard him loud and clear, because on Thursday they grabbed their assault rifles and stormed the Michigan state capitol building, under the guise of “protest.”
These people are domestic terrorists. The only reason they’re even still alive is that they’re white; otherwise law enforcement would have given them one warning and then shot them. Donald Trump is directly responsible for this domestic terrorist incident in Michigan. We’re all lucky that no one died in the incident. But in a month where Trump has already negligently gotten fifty-something thousand Americans murdered, that’s a small mercy.
For some reason, perhaps only because there was no body count, this Michigan domestic terrorist incident isn’t being clearly linked to Donald Trump’s tweet. As of yet there’s no mainstream media narrative demanding that he answer for the incident. Like the coward that he is, he won’t address it unless he’s forced to.
But if he does end up having to speak about this incident, we already know what Donald Trump will say, because he already said it when his white supremacist supporters murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville: “very fine people on both sides.”
