There He Goes Again!

I am beginning to think that questioning the behavior of President Donald Trump feels a bit like eating potato chips: Once you get started, it’s hard to stop! In my case, I “got started” when John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, took the President to task for threatening judges for doing their jobs in upholding the legal system. This was followed by Massachusetts Democratic congressman Jim McGovern reflecting on Trump’s arguments about rigged elections with a counter-argument that could not have been more informative: “You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe this bullshit.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (photograph by Tierney L. Cross for Getty Images, from an article in The Jerusalem Post)

In that context, Trump’s speech last night reminded me of the only quote from Ronald Regan that I can relish: “There you go again!” Al Jazeera now has a Web page for the perfect reinforcement of McGovern’s position. Trump decided to fire all his guns at Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, accusing him of being sympathetic to Palestinians. To the best of my knowledge, Schumer is Jewish and probably appreciates the founding of Israel as a “Jewish state” about 80 years ago. However, I suspect that he also appreciates the virtue of a country trying to be on good terms with its immediate neighbors.

As some readers probably already know, my first full-time job after I received my doctoral degree involved teaching computer science at the Technion, often referred to as the “Israel Institute of Technology.” I taught there for two years; and, in spite of political and religious differences, Israel managed to stay on reasonable (if not good) terms with its immediate neighbors. So I have a pretty good idea of where Schumer stands. On the other hand, I am also troubled by the fact that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may not be as open-minded about Israel’s neighbors as Schumer has been.

Indeed, when Netanyahu visits the White House this coming Tuesday, a Reuters article in today’s Jerusalem Post suggests that Trump may use the occasion as a stick for beating on Schumer! All this reminds me of the lengths to which the Constitution made it a point to distinguish the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches in terms of what they could and could not do. Apparently, the preamble never explicitly made the point that all members of all three branches should familiarize themselves with those terms; and now we may be facing the consequences of such negligence.