Trump’s speech to the Knesset, decoded

It’s a great honour. Nice place. Very nice place.”

Ever the property guy, Trump is the only world leader who would comment on his surroundings like this. A conventional speaker might commend the architecture or recall historic speeches made on this hallowed ground, but only Trump would open up as if he had popped round for the weekend to a mate’s new place.

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not easy. I want to tell you that he’s not the easiest guy to deal with, but that’s what makes him great. That’s what makes him great.”

This begins a section of introducing the band in which Trump runs through Netanyahu, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, his daughter Ivanka – pausing to marvel at her conversion to Judaism and wonder aloud whether she has a great marriage – Marco Rubio, General Caine, the combined generals of the Israeli Defence Force and the Israeli President. The tone is set by a long, punchline-free anecdote he tells about Witkoff’s five-hour meeting with Putin. The speech contains a compendium of Trump villains – Henry Kissinger is a big leaker, the “television general” (an irony lost on the television President), sleepy Joe and Obama’s bad Iran deal. All this is largely irrelevant to the subject at hand but, more than that, his tone of bitter jokiness is so completely inappropriate to a moment that any other speaker would regard as momentous and grave.

“Israel became strong and powerful, which ultimately led to peace. That’s what led to peace.”

It can be easy to forget, in the torrent of colloquialisms, that Trump is capable of being artful with his rhetoric. A strong and powerful Israel leads to peace. But so did a weak and powerless Hamas. The deal, as Trump would no doubt brag that he knows, needs two signatories and Israel has been brought to the table because it expects to get a lot, from a position of strength, and Hamas has been brought to the table because it hopes to get at least something from a position of great weakness.

“Two years ago, on the eve of the Simchat Torah holiday, thousands of innocent Israeli civilians were attacked by terrorists… The long and painful nightmare is finally over, and as the dust settles, the smoke fades. The debris is removed, and the ashes cleaned from the air. The day that breaks on a region transformed and a beautiful and much brighter future appears suddenly within your reach.”

Trump must be a nightmare for his speech writers. Here, he visibly turned to the prepared words on the autocue. He goes from ragged to scripted language while his delivery goes in the opposite direction, from lively to stilted. The conventional war address – Pericles of Athens, Elizabeth I on the Spanish Armada – is grand and sober. Even when his words are in that idiom, Trump’s perfunctory manner reveals he is keen to get back to the unscripted rambling. Still, at least he said it. At least, in these prepared remarks, some of the pieties and protocols are observed. Before long, though, he is back to riffing on how pretty the bombers were and how beautiful the American tankers are. As he says, with no rhetorical weight: “We had a hell of a lot of planes.”

“You should be partners and eventually even friends. And that’s what’s going to happen. I know it, together.”

I recall years ago seeing Sacha Baron Cohen playing an old Israeli gentleman who set out the gruesome details of the conflicts in the Middle East and then ended every section with the question: “Why can’t they just be friends?” Well, President Trump agrees. His ignorance of the history is a peculiar asset as he is unburdened by the suggestion that a deal is unlikely. In this speech he says that Russia will be next and then Iran. His stupidity is infectious, somehow. Why can’t they just be friends?

“That’s all I do in my life. I make deals. I’m good at it. I’ve always been good at it, and I know when they want. Even if they said, we don’t wanna make a deal, I can tell you they wanna make a deal.”

This is ostensibly about Iran but Trump’s speeches are all about Trump. Earlier in the speech, he upbraided Hillary Clinton for claiming he had a war personality when he is a man of peace. His personality and peace, are one and the same. And Trump can thereby answer the simple question: what are you for? I am for peace and I am the man who can cut a deal.

“Hey, I have an idea. Mr President, why don’t you give him a pardon? Give him a pardon. By the way, there was not in the speech, as you probably know.”

A moment of theatre which was greeted with a great ovation. Trump, bragging now that he has no script, implores President Herzog to pardon Prime Minister Netanyahu on criminal charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. President Trump obeys no authority other than his own inner voice. The public articulation of private prejudices was once the thing that separated dictators from democrats. A democratic leader has to weigh words carefully. But not Trump and we have to accept that there is a strange method in the madness, even as he says things that nobody else would ever say.

Photograph by Yoan Valat/Pool/AFP