“I supported Trump with full awareness that he would frequently embarrass himself, and, by extension, me”

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK/VIVIDIMAGERY

E

van Barker, who over the years has raised $50 million for Democratic politicians, published an article in the Free Press last year, in which she described why she had voted for Donald Trump. Predictably, old friends cut her off, her two-year-old was blackballed by a nursery school of her choice, and ultimately her family left San Francisco for a small town in Northern California. She describes the experience in a forthcoming book: Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative.

But she makes clear, “I didn’t vote for Trump anticipating that I would agree with everything he does.”

Speaking for myself, I would add, “I supported Trump with full awareness that he would frequently embarrass himself, and, by extension, me.” One such moment took place this week when the president pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, who had served only two years of a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking.

That pardon created an air of complete incoherence around American policy. At the very moment when the president has basically declared war on Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro for running drugs into the country, and has claimed the right to blast speedboats allegedly carrying those drugs out of the water, he pardons another Latin American leader-cum-drug lord.

When asked about the justification for the pardon, Trump sputtered unintelligibly. He wrote on Truth Social, “[A]ccording to many people that I greatly respect, [he] was treated very harshly and unfairly.” He later expanded upon that claim, telling a reporter that Hernandez had been “set up” by the Biden administration just because he was president when cocaine was be sent in large quantities from Honduras.

That claim was unsupported and, frankly, ridiculous. Hernandez was extradited by the US and convicted by a jury because he was, in the words of National Review’s Jim Geraghty, “up to his eyeballs” in the cocaine-smuggling ring headed by his brother, with an almost identical name, Juan Antonio Hernandez, now serving a life sentence for cocaine trafficking. That ring availed itself of the protection of the president’s National Party, in return for providing the National Party with a cut of the action.

Another of those embarrassing Trumpian moments — and one of greater consequence for the Jewish community — took place recently, when he weighed in on the controversy around Tucker Carlson’s softball interview of neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

First came a burst of the familiar Trump narcissism: “Well, I found him [Carlson] to be good. I mean, he said good things about me over the years. He’s, I think he’s good. We’ve had some good interviews. I did an interview with him — we were at 300 million hits.”

Embarrassing on two accounts. First, the assumption that an issue that is bitterly dividing his movement and party boils down to nothing more than whether Tucker has said nice things about him in the past.

Second, there are narcissists and stupid narcissists. Trump must know that Carlson has had found virtually nothing good to say about him of late. Prior to the bombing of Fordow, for instance, Carlson, speaking in his own voice, not just “asking questions,” accused Trump of leading America into another Middle East quagmire in which billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives would be lost. At the time, Trump referred to him as “kooky.” Of late, Carlson has been critical of Trump’s aggressive policy toward Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.

Next, Trump claimed, “I don’t know much about him [i.e., Nick Fuentes].” Trump may have had plausible deniability when he supped with Fuentes and rapper Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago, a few years back. But unless he wants the nickname “Sleepy Donald,” that is no longer possible.

The controversy over Carlson’s interview with Fuentes and the refusal to condemn Carlson by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts has been roiling Republican and MAGA ranks for weeks. If Trump is not asleep at the wheel, he cannot say he doesn’t know much about Fuentes any more.

Finally, Trump’s only comment on Carlson’s softball interview with Fuentes — “You can’t tell him whom to interview” — showed that he completely fails to understand the issue that has divided the MAGA movement and provoked headlines like “Is Donald Trump a lame duck?” or “Has Trump lost control of his movement?”

No one has ever suggested that Carlson does not have the right to interview whomever he wants. The question is whether there are any guardrails on the MAGA movement, like those William Buckley established in the conservative movement over fifty years ago.

Can one urge rounding up and killing Jews, as Fuentes has done, and still be part of the MAGA movement? That’s one question. The other: Is Carlson complicit in those ideas when he provides them with a broad audience? And if he is complicit, is he still part of the MAGA team?

“Ultimately, the people have to decide,” said Trump. That remark was too breezy by half to resolve a debate that has seen Carlson taken to the woodshed by Republican senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, and numerous evangelical leaders, after Carlson accused them in the Fuentes interview of having been seized by some sort of “brain fever” and of heresy for their Christian Zionism.

And what precisely is up to the people to decide? Whether it is legitimate to advocate killing Jews? To accuse them of advancing Israel’s interests at the expense of America’s?

Both Carlson and Fuentes, by the way, praised Trump for his support. Is that really the company Donald Trump wants to keep or the direction he wants his movement to go?

“All the World’s a Stage...”

Acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard passed away last week, nearly sixty years after the production of his first play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The play placed two minor characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet at the center, as scenes from Hamlet intermittently play out on the periphery.

I was reminded of Stoppard’s play this week, when my friend Rabbi Yehoshua Liff called me and asked whether I was the author of an old Jerusalem Post piece from July 1998 called “Hanging on the Fence at Yale.” Indeed, I am.

That piece centers on a series of confrontations with a Chabad mitzvah mobile that was parked every Sunday outside the only open exit from Yale’s Old Campus, where I served as a freshman counselor.

I had no ability to tell the person manning the van that I was not Jewish, even had my physiognomy not made the answer clear. Nor could I think of a plausible reason not to put on tefillin when offered the opportunity to do so.

The problem was that the delay occasioned by my struggle to wrap tefillin for the first time since pre-bar mitzvah tefillin club resulted in my arriving at the gym too late for any warmup shots before the law school basketball games were underway. Like many suburban youth who grew up with basketball hoops in the driveway, the only thing I could ever do well was shoot, and the lack of warmup led to a series of desultory performances.

By the third week, I was desperate to evade the van, and decided to climb the locked spiked fence at the other end of the Old Campus, even though that would put me a quarter of a mile farther away from the gym. I nearly impaled myself in the attempt, as my foot slipped on the icy crossbars, and one of the spikes ran up my sweatshirt, stopping just short of my jugular. I was left hanging there with my legs flailing for a foothold and my back to the Xmas shoppers in downtown New Haven.

At that moment, the thought crossed my mind: If a simple question — Are you Jewish? — could throw me into a panic sufficient to impel me to embark on such a ridiculous course of action, ending in humiliation, perhaps I should inquire a little more deeply into what it means to be Jewish. (No, I did not immediately pack my bags and head for Jerusalem, but the thought lingered.)

Why am I sharing this story now? Because it turns out that the Chabad shaliach manning the New Haven mitzvah mobile was none other than Rabbi Liff’s uncle, the husband of his mother’s younger sister, Rabbi Baruch Shalom Kahan, who passed away last week at 91.

Though I have shared this story many times, I have never once given any thought to who the person was who asked me on successive Sundays whether I was Jewish and whether I wanted to lay tefillin. Only when Reb Shui sent me a picture of his uncle, still with a black beard, receiving a dollar bill from the Rebbe, did a glimmer of recognition flicker. And only now was I learning from his nephew that he was a talmid chacham, a Shas Yid, a dedicated follower of the Rebbe, who while still a bochur used to stay up late at night typing up the sichos.

Rabbi Kahan had floated in and out of my life, to dramatic impact, without my ever giving him a second thought.

And it turned out, that I was also a bit player in a larger Chabad story. My friend also sent me an 11-minute clip of Chabad author and historian Rabbi Chaim Dalfin giving an appreciation of Rabbi Kahan. And smack in the middle, when discussing the mitzvah mobile, he mentions that a “famous Litvishe writer named Rosenblum” got his start in Yiddishkeit because of the mitzvah mobile.

He does not mention that I was fleeing from the mitzvah mobile. Fair enough. That flight and my subsequent humiliation probably had a greater impact on my religious trajectory than would have putting on tefillin one more time.

Learning about the long, productive life of the Jew who parked that mitzvah mobile outside the Old Campus every Sunday in the winter of 1975, and whose life had intersected mine without my paying any attention to him, and then hearing my name mentioned in passing in the story of Chabad in New Haven, brought home the extent to which life is often a series of intersecting stories in which we have an impact on others about whom we may not even be aware, and are, in turn, affected by many others who are not aware of us.

Just this week, I contacted someone from Baltimore who was a frequent Shabbos guest when he learned in Machon Shlomo over thirty years ago. He mentioned that I had given him as a wedding present a kuntres on marriage by Rav Chaim Friedlander, the late Ponevezh Mashgiach, and that he has been leading chaburos based on that kuntres for some time.

Even though I am presently learning Rav Friedlander’s sefer on tefillah, I did not even remember that he had a kuntres on marriage, much less that I had ever given it as a present. Just another reminder of how our greatest impact on others may not even be something we remember or even knew about.

Rabbi Ron Yitzchak Eisenman once related in these pages the story of woman whose path to becoming Jewish began when a group of yeshivah students passed by her outside the local library in Paterson, New Jersey, and not one even looked at her, which was a first-time experience for her. Yet not one of those bochurim has any clue of what they did by averting their gaze.

So, we should keep in mind that we are all moving through life as players in a cosmic drama, sometimes as Hamlet and sometimes as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and most often as both at the same time.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1090. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)