by Andrew Bernard
The president-elect’s picks suggest that his administration will “take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel seriously,” Blaise Misztal, of JINSA, told JNS.
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U.S. President Donald Trump visits the Kotel in Jerusalem's Old City on May 22, 2017. Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images. |
President-elect Donald Trump officially named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state on Wednesday.
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials
Trump has tapped in recent days, including former Arkansas governor
Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik
(R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the cabinet.
Brian Katulis, a senior fellow for U.S.
foreign policy at the Middle East Institute, told JNS that the picks
signal a strong departure from how the Biden administration handled
foreign policy in the Middle East and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
“It’s a big middle finger to those on the
so-called progressive left and others in the Biden camp, who essentially
had a different theory of the case that failed in the election,”
Katulis said.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy
at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told JNS that
Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related
foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will
approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that
President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the
Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the
U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said. “The people that
we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first
and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United
States and Israel face together in the region.”
The Trump team has reportedly chosen Brian
Hook, the former U.S. special representative for Iran and one of the
architects of the “maximum pressure” sanctions policy against the
Islamic Republic, to lead the transition at the U.S. State Department.
Misztal told JNS that Hook, who is one of
several former Trump administration officials who has a permanent
security detail because of Iranian death threats, will understand the
dangers that Tehran poses.
“The involvement of anyone that is on
Iran’s hit list in our foreign policy is a signal of taking the threat
seriously and knowing what they’re up against, and bringing a focus and a
seriousness to dealing with that threat that is much needed,” Misztal
said.
Controversial appointments
The nomination of Rubio drew
congratulations on Wednesday from Republicans and even some Democrats
like Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who called the pick a “strong choice.”
Other Trump nominations have raised
concerns from Republicans about their viability to make it through the
confirmation process and their effect on the Republican majority in the
House.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.)
announced on Wednesday that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) had resigned his
seat in Congress “effective immediately” after Trump nominated him to be
attorney general earlier that day.
“That caught us by surprise a little bit,” Johnson said of the resignation.
The nomination of Gaetz and former
Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national
intelligence elicited reactions ranging from confusion to laughter to
shock in some corners of the Republican Party.
“I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).
Gaetz cannot afford many defections in his
nomination vote since Republicans will likely hold a 53-47 majority in
the Senate. His resignation, following the picks of Stefanik and of Rep.
Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) to be national security advisor, will also dig into
the razor-thin Republican majority in the House.
Johnson said that Gaetz resigned in part
to allow Florida to initiate a special election that could fill his seat
as early as Jan. 3, when the incoming Congress is sworn in.
Trump has also suggested that he wants his
nominations to be made as recess appointments, bypassing the Senate
approval process, though it’s not clear that Senate Majority
Leader-elect John Thune (R-S.D.) is willing to take that approach, or if
it would pass constitutional muster if challenged in court.
Gaetz is widely reviled within the
Republican caucus for his role in ousting former House speaker Kevin
McCarthy in 2023, his chaotic persona and politics and his sexual
scandals.
In 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice
informed Gaetz that it would not bring charges against him following a
years-long investigation into whether he was involved in the sex
trafficking of a 17-year-old girl. He was under investigation by the
House ethics committee for sexual misconduct, drug use and accepting
improper gifts until his nomination, but Johnson said Wednesday that his
resignation terminated that investigation and the ethics committee
would not issue a report. Gaetz has long denied any wrongdoing.
Fetterman mocked the choice of Gaetz,
calling it “God-tier level trolling” to “own the libs in perpetuity,”
but that it would ultimately harm Republicans.
“Dem opinions on Gaetz aren’t that interesting,” he wrote. “The good ones will come from my GOP colleagues to justify a vote for that jerkoff.”
Both Gaetz and Gabbard have also faced controversy related to Israel and Jew-hatred.
Gaetz was one of just 21 Republicans who
voted against the Antisemitism Awareness Act in May, saying that he
could not support a definition of antisemitism that labeled claims of
“Jews killing Jesus” as antisemitic.
“The Gospel itself would meet the definition of antisemitism under the terms of this bill,” he wrote.
In 2021, he called the Anti-Defamation League “racist” after the group criticized former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
The ADL condemned the nomination of Gaetz
on Wednesday evening, citing his invitation of former political activist
Charles Johnson, who once denied the Holocaust in a since-deleted
Reddit post, to the State of the Union in 2018.
“Gaetz has a long history of trafficking
in antisemitism—from explaining his vote against the bipartisan
Antisemitism Awareness Act by invoking the centuries-old trope that Jews
killed Jesus to defending the Great Replacement Theory and inviting a
Holocaust denier as his 2018 State of the Union guest,” wrote
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL. “He should
not be appointed to any high office, much less one overseeing the
impartial execution of our nation’s laws.”
In his 2020 memoir Firebrand: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution,
Gaetz defended the invitation. “I can look past the worst some have
(falsely or fairly) been accused of doing,” he wrote. “I know no one
bats a thousand. I sure don’t.”
Gaetz bills himself as a supporter of Israel and has supported
previous Israel aid legislation, but he also was in the small minority
of Republicans who opposed the bipartisan Israel aid package in April.
Gabbard, who has undergone a political
transformation that saw her shift from endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders
(I-Vt.) in 2016 to endorsing Trump in 2024, has a mixed record on Israel
and Jewish issues.
In 2019, she defended Rep. Ilhan Omar
(D-Minn.) from charges of antisemitism after the House voted to condemn
Omar for Jew-hating bigotry. In 2018, she criticized Israel for using
live ammunition at the Gaza border fence, but she has come out as a
strong supporter of the Jewish state since the Hamas terrorist attacks
in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
As she seeks to head the U.S. intelligence
community, the former Hawaiian congresswoman is also likely to face
scrutiny from lawmakers about her 2017 meeting with Syrian dictator
Bashar Assad and her views on Russia, which she said had “legitimate
security concerns” in Ukraine shortly after the start of Russia’s
February 2022 invasion.
“Dear Presidents Putin, Zelensky and
Biden. It’s time to put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of
aloha, respect and love, for the Ukrainian people by coming to an
agreement that Ukraine will be a neutral country,” she wrote three days after the start of the invasion.
Another Trump nominee likely to face hurdles in the Senate is Pete Hegseth, a Fox News
anchor whom Trump has tapped to be the defense secretary. Hegseth is a
retired U.S. Army major, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan but lacks
the experience leading large bureaucracies in government or the private
sector that has typified most of the men who have been chosen to oversee
the Pentagon.
Unpredictable moves
Experts told JNS that a second Trump would
likely overturn Biden administration policies but that it might not be
possible to return to some of the approaches Trump took in his first
term, like the “maximum pressure” Iran policy.
“It’s a much more complicated region,”
Katulis, of the Middle East Institute, told JNS. “It’s one where the
demands for a two-state solution on the Palestinian front are now being
voiced more strongly by the Saudi Arabias of the region. That was not
the case in the first term of Trump, and I think that’s one thing his
team will have to reconcile.”
“What I heard across Arab Gulf states is
that we don’t want escalation with Iran,” he added. “A lot of these
countries may not be as aligned with the attempted restart of maximum
pressure, in part because they’ve hedged their bets with Iran and also
with China. China is a major consumer of Iranian oil and Arab Gulf oil.”
One area where Trump might act swiftly would be to lift the Biden administration’s sanctions
on Israelis, whom the White House accuses of being engaged in
“extremist settler violence” in Judea and Samaria, and to green light
arms sales to Israel that some Republican senators allege the Biden
administration has slow-rolled through the bureaucratic U.S. approval
process.
“This idea that the United States would
try to hamstring or restrain Israeli operations by controlling the flow
of weapons is not going to be a concern in the Trump administration,”
JINSA’s Misztal told JNS.
Trump has reportedly told Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he wants Israel’s war against Hamas to
be concluded by the time he takes office.
During the campaign, Israel and the Middle
East played a relatively small role in Trump’s messaging compared to
domestic issues, immigration and U.S. competition with China.
But Katulis warned that Trump, like his
recent predecessors, is unlikely to succeed in extricating America from
the Middle East to focus on those more pressing challenges.
“In the last 25 years, almost every
president has had his Michael Corleone moment on the Middle East, which
is, ‘Just when I thought I was out, I get pulled back in,’” Katulis
said.
“Even if Trump goes in and doesn’t
prioritize the Middle East relative to these other files, things will
happen,” he said. “Something will force his hand.”
Andrew Bernard
Source: https://www.jns.org/trump-nominations-a-big-middle-finger-to-anti-israel-progressives/
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