Note: This article was published in last week’s American Free Press. I had to change some of the wording, because AFP has a no-four-letter-words policy—even when the four letter word is part of an eight letter word! The creatively edited version turned out fine. Meanwhile here is the original. People who subscribe to AFP as well as my Substack are invited to let me know, in the comments, which version they prefer. -KB
By Kevin Barrett, for American Free Press
Say what you like about Donald Trump, the man is a world-class bullshitter. Is that a compliment? To find out, let’s define our terms.
In his classic book On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt defines bullshit as speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. By that definition, most politicians are bullshitters, to varying degrees. The presidents who preceded Trump, all the way back to Jimmy Carter (whose modest concern for truth grew out of religious conviction) never seemed to care much about truth as they used their persuasive powers in pursuit of winning elections and satisfying wealthy constituents.
But when it comes to the art of spewing lily-gilding, pig-lipsticking 100% kosher bullshit, Trump is in a league of his own. His October 13 speech to the Israeli Knesset was a master class that demonstrated the full extent of the American president’s considerable powers.
But before exploring Trump’s masterful BS—which in essence consisted of awarding himself dozens of Nobel Peace Prizes for solving the Mideast conflict and seven other wars—let’s briefly consider a few ugly truths. First and most importantly, Trump himself caused the post-October 7 war, more accurately termed an Israeli genocide, by pursuing extremist pro-Israeli policies during his first term. Owned by pro-Israel gangsters including Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Trump bucked the unanimous advice of all Mideast experts, including his own CIA, State Department, and Pentagon, and handed Netanyahu’s messianic-millenarian regime everything it asked for: moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing the stolen Golan Heights as part of Israel, and strong-arming US puppets in the region to ignore their people and establish diplomatic relations with the squatters in what everyone in the MENA region calls “Occupied Palestine.” Worse, Trump shredded the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran, setting the stage for Israel to drag America into a war that has not yet ended—and that has turned Iran into an undeclared nuclear weapons state.
The truth is that Trump’s much-vaunted “Abraham Accords” were always a complete joke that nobody in the region takes seriously. Even the US-puppet dictators who signed them consider them ridiculous. Nobody in the region will ever even consider allowing the genocidal squatters in Occupied Palestine to have a legitimate state unless and until “Israel” complies with all relevant UN resolutions, starting with complete withdrawal from all land stolen in 1967. And that is not just the regional consensus, but the international one as well. It was also the position of the US until Trump, owned by the Adelsons and other extremist Jewish gangsters, turned the US into an international outlaw—a rogue state—by reversing the longstanding international consensus on “land for peace” that was supposed to be the basis of the Oslo accords. By ratifying Israeli larceny, Trump left the Palestinians, and their hundreds of millions of regional supporters, no choice but to do something like the October 7th raid. So the carnage of the two-year genocide of Gaza must be laid entirely at Trump’s doorstep.
Trump’s outrageous BS at the Knesset ignored his own responsibility for the disaster. He proclaimed grandiloquently and repeatedly that he and his brilliant team of real estate sharks turned peace negotiators had just ushered in “the golden age of Israel, and the golden age of the Middle East.” Like a rooster taking credit for a false sunrise, Trump crowed about “the historic dawn of a new Middle East.” He uncritically embraced Israeli propaganda about how “the cruelty of October 7th struck to the core of humanity itself”—ignoring the fact that the Israeli military used helicopter gunships and tanks to slaughter most of the civilians who died that day, and that almost all of the extreme cruelty in the conflict has been dished out by Israelis, not Palestinians.
But the most fascinating and entertaining aspect of Trump’s rabid bullshit is the occasional nuggets of truth that shine forth from it. While speaking at the Knesset, Trump turned to Miriam Adelson, whose Kosher Nostra family spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy Trump for Israel, and half-jokingly called her out for being loyal to Israel not the United States:
“But I actually asked her, I’m gonna get her in trouble with this, but I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means, that might mean, Israel, I must say.”
Trump had just stated that the Adelsons’ money convinced him to validate Israel’s theft of the Golan Heights. By thus openly admitting that he had been bribed by agents of a foreign power, Trump made visible what lesser presidential bullshitters have always sought to conceal.
