Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Thursday (not Friday) at Noon EDT.
Our guest will be Anshel Pfeffer, senior correspondent and columnist for Haaretz, and author of Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu and Maran: A Biography of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. We’ll talk about the Netanyahu the man, about ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel, a subject Pfeffer has covered closely for many years, and what Anshel thinks American progressives like me get wrong about Israel.
As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Maggie Haberman, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
My 2018 Atlantic story on Donald Trump’s unpatriotic hypernationalism.
Trump’s reckless treatment of classified national security documents as president.
Trump’s contempt for American soldiers who die in battle.
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Dahlia Krutkovich and Sarah Rosen write about “the Israeli far right’s man in Princeton.”
Jonathan Guyer on the powerful people who attended Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday party but won’t explain why.
The Palestine-Israel Journal’s issue on the 75th anniversary of Israel’s creation and the Nakba is well worth reading.
On June 18 at 2:30pm EDT, I’ll be on a zoom panel entitled “Israel and Palestine in Crisis” with Arielle Angel, Jacqueline Rose, and Adam Sutcliffe for Independent Jewish Voices in the United Kingdom.
See you on Thursday (not Friday),
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Our guest this week will be on Thursday at noon EDT—not the usual Friday—Thursday. It’ll be Anshel Pfeffer, who’s a columnist and senior correspondent for Haaretz. Anshel Pfeffer has written a biography of Benjamin Netanyahu recently, so we’ll talk about Netanyahu the man. Anshel is also one of the journalists who has most closely covered the haredi, or ultra-orthodox community in Israel for many years. In fact, he wrote a biography of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who was the most influential ultra-orthodox Sephardi Rabbi in modern Israeli history. And so, we’ll talk about ultra-orthodox Judaism in Israel, its relationship to Zionism, and to nationalism. And we’ll also talk about Anshel’s criticisms, which he’s made in print of American progressives like me, and what he thinks we get wrong about Israel-Palestine. That’ll be on Friday—sorry not on Friday—it’ll be on Thursday for paid subscribers. And of course, paid subscribers also get all our previous calls with people like Noam Chomsky, and Ilhan Omar, and Bret Stephens, and Thomas Friedman, and other folks like that.
I wanted to see something about the big news here in the United States that Trump has been indicted for mishandling of classified documents. And I think it speaks to something that I think is fascinating and revealing about Trump. And it’s this—it’s something I wrote about years ago—is that Trump is simultaneously deeply unpatriotic and yet deeply nationalistic. You might call him an unpatriotic hypernationalist. And this combination, I think, helps to really understand a lot of his political identity and this particular scandal, in particular. Because if you think about the offense in this scandal, right, what did Trump do? He took these confidential national security documents, which talk about, you know, American war plans and American military vulnerabilities. He took them with him, and he stored them in these very unsafe ways. And then he tried to hide them when the FBI tried to take them back.
Now this was not really an offense against the kind of principles that progressives tend to be most concerned about. It wasn’t a kind of offense against human rights or human equality— obviously Trump had many of those. But this was really an offense against the national security state. It was an offense against national security, which is part of the reason the FBI and the national security state was so upset about it because Trump was endangering the functioning of the American military and the national security state, the very kind of thing you think that Republicans are supposed to prize. And indeed, Trump’s own former Attorney General Bill Barr said on Fox News on Sunday about Trump’s treatment of these documents that, ‘anyone who cares about national security, their stomachs would churn.’
And this is something perhaps that gets lost because we think of Republicans like Trump as being these people who are deeply patriotic, deeply supportive of the American military and the American national security apparatus, but in fact that’s not the case for Trump at all. Trump really has disdain for the American military because Trump is not able to imagine the idea of sacrifice for something greater than himself. He’s not really able to see the value in not keeping these personal documents for himself if they could be valuable for him, valuable financially, or valuable just for his ego, because he should subordinate those personal concerns to the larger security of the country. That kind of patriotism is just something that he doesn’t really understand. And this is what people inside his administration have for years been saying. He was extremely cavalier about national security documents and secrecy when he was president. And not just cavalier, but downright contemptuous and disdainful of American troops, which you would think of as the kind of the core of what it means to be patriotic, at least as defined by conservatives, right, patriotism as reverence for the people who die in service of the country’s safety. But Trump wasn’t reverent about those people. He thought there were losers and suckers. Those are actually his words: losers and suckers.
There’s a story that Jeffrey Goldberg has reported that in 2018 Trump refused to visit an American WWI cemetery in Europe because he said, ‘why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.’ There’s another story about when Trump went to Arlington National Cemetery with General Kelly, who was his then-Homeland Security Advisor. General Kelly’s son, who like him, was a military man. General Kelly’s son was buried at Arlington National Cemetery because he had died in war. And when Trump went to Arlington National Cemetery to see these dead soldiers, he said to Kelly, ‘I don’t get it. What was in it for them?’ And then one of Kelly’s friends says to Jeff Goldberg about Trump, ‘he can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself. He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker.’
So, Trump is profoundly unpatriotic in the sense that he really has no respect for the idea that you should sacrifice for a collective, in this case for the state, nor does he have much interest in sacrificing for other collectives, for instance, the family, right, by being faithful to one’s wife, for instance, right. For Trump, really, there is no larger good that ever trumps his own personal good and vis-à-vis the state or the nation that would make him profoundly unpatriotic, if you think about patriotism as being about the relationship of the individual to the nation. But the reason I think that people don’t notice that about Trump is that we don’t make a clear distinction between this kind of patriotism, which has to do with the relationship between the nation and the individual, and nationalism, which really has to do with the relationship between the nation and other nations. And so, while Trump is profoundly unpatriotic because he is not willing to sacrifice anything of value for the collective, in this case the collective of the nation, he is deeply nationalistic in the sense that a large part of his political identity has to do with championing the United States vis-à-vis other nations.
So, if you think of nationalism as the relationship of countries to other countries, nations to other nations, and patriotism as the relationship of the nation to the individual, Trump manages to be deeply unpatriotic and yet deeply nationalist at the same time. In sharp contrast, you might say to John McCain, one of the interesting things just linguistically is that Trump’s slogan was ‘America first.’ McCain’s slogan in 2008 was ‘country first.’ They might sound similar, but in fact they mean completely different things. Because what McCain was getting at—of course, McCain, the guy who had been imprisoned in Vietnam, refused offers to be let out early because his father was an admiral. For him, ‘country first’ was all about saying, ‘I, John McCain, am the kind of person who puts country over individual.’ For Trump, ‘America first’ had nothing to do with the idea that he would sacrifice as an individual for the country. What it meant was putting America first rather than other countries. That Trump’s notion, one of the main notions in his campaign, was that American leaders had not been loyal to the United States. They’d been loyal to other countries or to globalism itself. So, Trump, in his inaugural address, said, ‘at the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America.’
But again, he doesn’t mean, I’m going to be loyal to the United States of America rather than to myself. He means, I’m going to be loyal to the United States of America, and not loyal to Mexico, or loyal to, you know, some shadowy corporation that’s controlled by George Soros, or whatever. And, in fact, one of the things that Trump did so effectively in 2016 was to play on the perception that America had been humiliated and ripped off by other countries, and to promise that he would in fact humiliate and rip off other countries in return. So, if you remember, he didn’t just say he was going to build a wall on America’s southern border. The line that he used in every speech was, I’m going to build it and make Mexico pay for it, right? So, we are going to humiliate them, that America will be elevated over other countries. And for Trump, as for many other kind of hypernationalists, the notion of the nation and putting the nation above other nations is not simply a story about people who live in the United States, or American citizens, because for Trump the nation is also an ethno-nationalist project. So, the nation has its real members who are white Christians, and then it has other people who may be living inside the country, but are not real Americans, right. So, for Trump, the hypernationalism is a way of saying, I’m going to put real members of the nation above those other people whose interests have been served too much by the government, whether it’s asylum seekers or refugees or undocumented people or even just immigrants in general, or Muslims, or Mexicans, or people who are not real Americans in Trump’s world.
So, this, I think, is the curiosity that we see with Trump that this particular scandal brings to light, which is the combination of his deep lack of patriotism and his further fervent hypernationalism. And because I think the two are often conflated in the conversation, the one—the nationalism—tends to obscure his lack of patriotism, but I think it’s really important to keep the two separate in understanding this political phenomenon of this man who still gravely threatens the rule of law and I think the American republic itself. Again, our guest will be on Thursday. It’ll be Anshel Pfeffer from Haaretz. I hope many of you will join us.
Trump, The Unpatriotic Hypernationalist