I was listening to it on LBC, half-expecting to switch stations after a minute or two. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. What I was hearing from Jerusalem was so breathtakingly self-congratulatory that it verged on parody. Trump was speaking to the Knesset – or rather, speaking at it – and for an hour and a quarter he managed to turn one of the most charged moments in modern diplomacy into a one-man pageant of ego.
He declared “the war is over” as if peace were his personal property – another tower to slap his name on. Gaza’s devastation was brushed aside; the suffering didn’t fit the narrative. Then, with characteristic tone-deafness, he publicly called for Netanyahu to be pardoned, as though Israeli justice were just another licensing deal in the Trump brand portfolio.
The speech itself was a spectacle of rambling bravado. Religious name-dropping, half-finished sentences, applause lines repeated until even the translators lost the will to live. The God of Abraham was wheeled out like an honorary sponsor. Every thread led back to himself: the dealmaker, the saviour, the indispensable man.
Netanyahu, of course, joined the chorus. You could almost see the mutual relief – two embattled leaders clinging to each other’s myth for legitimacy. One fights indictment, the other irrelevance; both mistook the echo of their own praise for the voice of destiny.
The Palestinians were barely mentioned. Their grief doesn’t photograph well, and Trump’s version of peace doesn’t require empathy – only an audience. The result was grotesque: a ceremony of self-worship performed on the edge of a crater.
And when this fragile ceasefire inevitably collapses, as it surely will, the footage of this spectacle will stand as testament to the delusion. History won’t record a peacemaker that day; it will remember a showman mistaking applause for evidence, imagining that his voice alone could drown out the truth.
The Messiah from Mar-a-Lago came to Jerusalem – and once again, the only miracle he performed was turning diplomacy into self-promotion.
1 comment:
I was watching the BBC News channel until the Grifter-in-Chief got up to freestyle his stream of consciousness when I had to switch off. Thought I might vomit at all the self-righteous, self-congratulating back-slapping; at the invoking of God and Old Testament prophets by two men who wouldn't recognise a Bible/Torah if it slapped them in the face; at the complete denial of the human trauma and the physical and ecological destruction that has been caused in Gaza.
Mad Vlad must be rubbing his hands in glee at the thought of what he can now get away with in Ukraine.
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