The Easiest Way to See What is Going on with Trump and Bibi is to Listen to Ben Shapiro

I’m not doing the news anymore. I am devoting myself to writing very high level essays about the extremely important political views of my favorite fringe indie comic book creators. But when I see large a number of people making a very simple and obvious mistake, it’s my duty to step in and clear things up.

There is much discussion about the nature of the apparent rift between Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu. Many people are suggesting that this is some kind of staged thing. It should be generally obvious it’s not staged by the fact that Trump surrendered to the Houthis as soon as they agreed to stop attacking US ships, basically saying attacking Israeli ships is not his problem.

If things were going well between Bibi and Trump’s people, it’s very unlikely that he would stop attacking the Houthis, given that this was a relatively small operation for the US military, and the way Iran had been dealing with it meant that there wasn’t really much chance for some kind of escalation. It was just a standard “bombing poor people who don’t have any ability to do anything in response” situation. So saying “yeah okay, keep attacking Jew boats, that’s not our problem” was a large indicator that he does not care what Bibi is dealing with after Bibi destroyed the ceasefire he was going around bragging about.

Trump recently said publicly that there was a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which is also pretty telling.

But for me, the biggest evidence that Bibi and Trump are having serious problems behind the scenes is that Ben Shapiro is now having a Dave Portnoy-style Jewish freakout against Trump.

Ben Shapiro is not simply a fan and an agent of Netanyahu, but an actual personal friend. As in, they text each other regularly. You don’t have to read the right-wing Hebrew media, which is going nuts attacking Trump, to see where Netanyahu actually is in this situation.

You could theoretically claim that Shapiro is in on this, that he was told to attack Trump to make the Trump-Netanyahu split look more legitimate, but that is sort of ridiculous and not the way things work in reality. Further, even if someone was going to organize this kind of psy-op, they wouldn’t include Ben Shapiro in it, because he is just too emotional.

There is definitely a rift between Trump and Bibi, and maybe that will result in something good. I hope it does. I hope that Trump figures out a way to get Bibi out of office. Ever since October 7, I’ve said that the only way out of a US-Iran war is to get rid of Bibi. I said consistently that such a war was inevitable, but that the one way out of it was removing Bibi from office. It’s obvious that the Trump people have come to that same conclusion.

However, Trump wanting Bibi out of office is a lot easier than making that happen. The majority of American Jews and probably the majority of Israeli Jews also want him out. Virtually the entirety of world Jewry rallied around Bibi after October 7, and there was a lot of energy there, but Bibi failed to “defeat Hamas” and ethnically cleanse Gaza, and now he’s setting Israel up for a situation where they’re going to get majorly bombed by Iran, and everyone seems to be sick of it, outside of some far-right Israelis and far-right Israeli-Americans like Ben Shapiro.

Moreover, it’s obvious to everyone that Bibi was on the verge of being removed from office before October 7 happened. Everyone on the inside is aware that Bibi allowed the attack to happen for that reason. He doesn’t have much good will anywhere outside of his own cult.

Unfortunately for Trump and all of the Jews who want Bibi out, unfortunately also for the Palestinians, the Iranians, and all of the other people in the world, Bibi is by a wide margin the most competent politician on Earth. Trump is not particularly competent. Maybe Steve Witkoff is competent. That is certainly the narrative. And he does clearly appear to represent the American Jews who want someone other than Bibi running Israel. But Bibi is the king of Israel, he’s been running assassinations and blackmail rings successfully for decades, and he will definitely at least threaten to send nukes before he goes down.

Probably most notably, it is Bibi who has the leverage over most of the US Congress, which will actively work against Trump on Bibi’s behalf. Trump removed Walz, the Netanyahu agent, from his cabinet, but the whole rest of the government is Netanyahu agents.

I’m interested and excited about some of the moves Trump has been making. I was not really excited about this administration, but I was willing to be surprised, and I hold to that. I hope he is doing the surprise right now. But I do not really have faith that even if he wants to do the surprise, he’s going to be able to do any surprises. It really does all hinge on Bibi staying or going. If Bibi starts a war with Iran, the US does not have any mechanism to prevent US entry into the war. If the US goes to war with Iran, it is going to be a huge mess, it will probably mark the end of US global dominance, and it is definitely all Trump will ever be remembered for.

So, I’m still not really very optimistic here. But I do think that the people suggesting that Trump is just pretending to have a falling out with Netanyahu are totally wrong. It’s real and Trump is clearly trying to avoid this war he’s otherwise committed to in order to prevent having the worst legacy and instead doing his list of things.

I don’t know. We’ll see. I don’t really care.