Bill Kristol and Dr. Eliot Cohen called the 45th President a “fraud” and merely “transactional” with his support for Israel and Jewish Americans.
In a Zoom call with Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA), two Jewish conservative political experts had stern warnings about what a second Trump Administration could mean for Israel and American Jews.
Bill Kristol and Dr. Eliot Cohen headlined the JDCA discussion on Oct. 14, which was moderated by Sarah Cohen, a former chief speechwriter for Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon (a member of the Likud party) during Trump’s first term.
Kristol was the Chief of Staff to Vice President Dan Quayle during President George H.W. Bush’s presidency. In the decades since, he’s been a republican strategist, conservative commentator and was the founder and editor of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard (which ceased operations in 2018). He’s currently an editor-at- large of The Bulwark. Cohen is a political scientist who was a counselor to Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice during President George W. Bush’s second term and former Dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Both Cohen and Kristol identified as republican for decades. In recent years, they have called themselves “Never Trumpers”
“Maybe Trump personally has some attachments to Israel because of family or because he has longtime business associates who are Jewish and somewhat pro-Israel,” Kristol said. “But none of that could be counted on in the second term, partly because he's Trump and he's erratic and it's all transactional. And as we saw with the statement, well, he's not going to be very pleased if the Jews don't vote for him because he's ‘done so much for them.’ What does that imply? So much for the depth of his commitments to Israel or to the Jews.”
Cohen called into question Trump’s sincerity throughout his entire career before and during his presidency.
“[Trump has] made a whole career out of gulling people with his phony university, with his selling Bibles and golden sneakers and stuff like that,” Cohen said. “And lying, I mean, egregiously, he's good at it. He really is a very talented grifter. And I think unfortunately people are susceptible to that. And you might like to think the Jews are smarter than everybody else, but they're not. And they're susceptible. They're particularly susceptible to people saying, ‘we love you.’ And Trump knows how to do that in just the right way, I think, to push the buttons and elicit a response. But it's a fraud.”
Kristol said that although Trump’s “America First” doctrine “may not be bad for Israel on day one,” but called it “dangerous,” “very risky,” and “bad for Israel for four years.”
On the topic of the Biden Administration’s policy towards Israel, Cohen said that he had “some reservations,” while also calling out far-left anti-Israeli sentiment on college campuses.
“If you look at the quantities of arms that were shipped [from the U.S. to Israel], if you look at Biden's visit [to Israel] himself—and I've been extremely critical of President Biden in other respects—that was a remarkable thing,” Cohen said. “I don't think Donald Trump would do that. And I think [Democrats] have shown support, particularly given the fact that in their own constituency there are loud voices that are very anti-Israel. And of course I'm thinking about the campuses.
Kristol dismissed reports of the Biden Administration’s pausing of “a shipment of U.S.-made ammunition to Israel” in May of this year. He also compared Biden’s support for Israel to that of past Republican and Democratic Presidents.
“They held up one shipment of arms for, I don’t know, a few weeks or something, and they did a lot of stuff behind the scenes like every American administration has done when Israel has been at war,” Kristol said. “And at times, one chafes a little bit at it, at times maybe they were mistaken. But on the whole, when historians look at this compared to ‘73 with Nixon, ‘67 certainly with Johnson, ‘82 with Reagan …this Biden administration was more supportive, more unequivocally supportive, stayed the course in supporting and is still staying the course in supporting.”
Both Kristol and Cohen talked about their concerns with Trump handling an increasingly volatile situation with Israel and Iran.
“The key to the Iranian problem is that actually it's not even their nuclear program solely, it's the nature of the Iranian regime, which is a revolutionary regime where hostility to the United States and hostility to Israel are the basic DNA,” Cohen said. “We're ‘the greater Satan,’ the Israelis are the ‘lesser Satan.’ [Trump] couldn't care less about any of that. I think for a number of reasons. I think Kamala Harris does care much more about that regime for a whole bunch of reasons. One of the reasons I think, by the way, is the status of women [in Iran].”
On the topic of an Iran deal, Cohen warned that Trump's “dealmaker” persona is a “fraud.”
“Let's remember Donald Trump has made loads and loads of really bad deals,” Cohen said. “Somehow the idea that he's a good deal maker, it's a fraud like most of the rest of his business life. So I think I have higher confidence in Kamala Harris, like Bill, I've been around too long to have absolute confidence in any politician, but I know where there's a huge delta and there is an enormous delta here between what I think Kamala Harris will do and what I think Donald Trump will do.”
Kristol took issue with Trump making threats on the domestic front to use his power as President to go after anyone he deems disloyal.
“Trump has obviously total contempt for the rule of law,” Kristol said. “Jews have done very well, partly because we have a pretty strong rule of law. You don't get to come in and say, ‘I don't like those Jewish businesses over there. Those guys didn't help me out. I want you to go after them, IRS.’
Cohen saw much reassurance in the letter that Harris released on Oct. 7, where she said “I will do everything in my power to ensure that the threat Hamas poses is eliminated, that it is never again able to govern Gaza, that it fails in its mission to annihilate Israel, and that the people of Gaza are free from the grip of Hamas.”
Cohen called it “an extraordinarily powerful statement” and “the statement of somebody with a moral center who keenly felt what the horrors of that day were.” Cohen continued, “If she's elected, both Bill and I will probably— beginning sometime in late January [2025]— be criticizing the policies of the [Harris] administration, but the point is, it's well within the norm. It's not somebody who I think has the profound lack of character that Donald Trump has.”