Nov. 12: Flustered Dems Scramble, Seek Cover

Kabul is free of Jews; Rubio to State, Huckabee to Jerusalem; Mehdi Hasan blames the victims in Amsterdam

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The Big Story

It’s been a week since Kamala Harris’ Election Day wipeout, in which Donald Trump won the popular vote—overturning the myth that Republicans only win national elections owing to fusty inbuilt white supremacy inherent to the Electoral College—and the Republicans gained control of the Senate and retained their House majority. The Democrats have been swimming in a toxic pool of fear, anxiety, and recrimination, evidently shocked that their last-minute candidate switcheroo and its attendant fanfare failed to compel the electorate to follow direction. A decade’s worth of intense admonitions about fascism, Nazis, insurrections, and democracy were shrugged off by the American people in one evening.

The party of Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer is reeling, and fingers are pointing in every direction. Some blame Harris for her uninspired, reclusive campaigning; others blame President Biden for not getting out of the way sooner and then for sabotaging the process by prematurely throwing his support behind Harris. The choice of Tim Walz as running mate was a weird gamble that badly misjudged his appeal as a “normal” Midwestern man’s man, and exit polls from Pennsylvania indicate that Gov. Josh Shapiro might have been a better choice, despite opposition from the teachers’ union juggernaut. Staff from losing campaigns always have plenty of blame to pass around, scapegoating everything from mismanaged resources to flawed messaging and more.

The fumbling of pundits has provided a rich source of humor and gloating for the right. Historian Allan Lichtman, whose “13 Keys to the White House” model gained unaccountable attention this cycle, insisted that Harris had victory locked down because her party had turned such dubiously assigned keys as “being untainted by scandal,” “a strong economy,” and “opponent is uncharismatic.” When his supposedly foolproof model failed, Lichtman explained that the problem lay not with him, but in the ignorance of the electorate, which had been duped by Elon Musk and Fox News into believing falsehoods. Others blamed racism and misogyny, the standard-bearers of the grievance parade, for Harris’ loss. Elie Mystal, the “justice correspondent” of The Nation, posted, “White people did this, and white people have to answer their own evil. Black folks are just innocent bystanders to their violence and bullshit.” MSNBC crackpot Joy Reid blamed anti-Blackness, especially on the part of nonwhites who are “down with white supremacy.”

Pragmatic, victory-focused Democrats encouraged the party to move away from its incessant emphasis on identity politics and return to the gas-and-groceries, kitchen-table focus on economic and family issues that helped Trump capture working-class votes and create a multiracial coalition that Republicans of decades past could only dream of achieving. Clinton-era political guru James Carville expressed his disgust with contemporary Democrat ivory tower bubble speak and hammered “Washington-based Democrats farting around, going to wine and cheese parties and talking about how misogynistic … This identity shit was a disaster. We told you to get out in front of public safety issues. You didn’t.”

Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton told The New York Times that Trump won partly because the left refuses to acknowledge that matters such as letting boys play in girls’ sports are controversial to most people, and that refusal to allow debate on the issue turns the average voter off. Local Democrats criticized Moulton for his remarks, though it bears pointing out that his commonsense, pragmatic approach to transgender athletics dates no earlier than Nov. 6; he is on the record in 2023 opposing a bill “forcing” transgender athletes “to participate in programs that don’t align with their gender.” Moulton, who ran a brief presidential campaign in 2020, is clearly positioning himself for 2028 as a no-nonsense centrist.

Meanwhile, leftist Democrats demand a return to the working-class bread-and-butter issues that they feel are theirs by right. Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders released a statement after the election saying, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.” Sanders demanded a renewed focus on wealth inequality, socialized health care, and an end to support for Israel, along with other priorities that the American people supposedly want, though somehow never vote for.

The problem for the Democrats is that it’s not clear that they can credibly turn their clumsy ship around and set it steaming toward the isles of lunch-bucket politics. The principles of critical race theory and intersectionality are the fabric of their party, and other issues are subsidiary. The Democratic coalition is now a hierarchy of special interests in which the most marginal groups are elevated to prominence. Before the election in 2028, Democrats can try their best to shake off the obsessive fixation on identity that they embraced as their brand. But they risk jettisoning their most loyal constituencies if they do.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Obama isn’t going anywhere, argues Lee Smith

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The Rest

→Unconfirmed reports that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will be Trump’s secretary of state have been met with cheers by traditionally hawkish foreign-policy watchers and with dismay by MAGA America Firsters. Rubio is considered a hard-liner on China and Iran, and he’s ferociously pro-Israel, so concerns that Trump would be swayed by the Lindbergh wing of the new Republican Party can be safely allayed. A video of Sen. Rubio’s interchange regarding Hamas with the execrable Medea Benjamin of Code Pink—an organization with ties to the Chinese Communist Party—made the rounds after news of his possible appointment emerged:

CODE PINK: Senator Rubio, will you call for a cease-fire Senator Rubio, please.

RUBIO: Are you filming it? Wait. I want you guys to get this. I want them to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on. These people are vicious animals who did horrifying crimes, and I hope you guys post that because that’s the truth.

→Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee will be the next American ambassador to Israel. This move further cements the incoming Trump administration’s commitment to a strong, proactive relationship between America and its closest regional ally. Huckabee has been a long supporter of Israel, and the announcement demonstrates that the combative foreign-policy wing of the Republican Party has the upper hand against the more isolationist perspective. Huckabee has expressed interest in buying a vacation home in Israel, specifically in a West Bank settlement.

→Almost three millennia of continuous Jewish presence in Afghanistan have come to an end with the aliyah of Zablon Simintov, the last Jew of Kabul. Though there have been reports that Simintov—evidently something of a cantankerous character whom even the Taliban could not endure to keep prisoner—had left Afghanistan, a new account claims he really has left and taken up residence in Israel. The Jewish presence in Afghanistan is long and storied, especially along the Silk Road, where ancient synagogues and cemeteries attest to the longevity of the Afghan Jewish community. The Jews were never expelled from Afghanistan, which permitted Jewish émigrés to retain their citizenship, though most left in the ’60s for economic reasons. Slowly, slowly the Silk Road, once a thriving network of Jewish communities from Cairo to Kaifeng, gives up its Jews.

→Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, received plaudits in May when he applied for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for having committed crimes against humanity. (Khan also sought warrants for the arrest of Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mohammad al-Masri, though their recent deaths at the hands of the IDF have likely mooted the prosecutor’s requests.) Now, Khan faces his own legal challenges, as he has been accused of sexually assaulting a former aide and then pressuring her to deny the claims. Khan denies the charges and claims to have been the victim of a smear campaign that his supporters suggest was launched by Israeli intelligence. Curiously, Khan’s brother, former Member of the U.K. Parliament Imran Ahmad Khan, was convicted of child sexual assault in 2022.

→Unrest related to the Amsterdam soccer pogrom continues, as a tram was set on fire by a mob of Muslim men who apparently are still on a “hunt” for Jews. The repulsive journalist Mehdi Hasan has taken it upon himself to “both-sides” the issue, repeating the allegedly mitigating fact that some Israeli supporters of the Maccabi soccer team were chanting anti-Arab slogans and might have torn down a Palestinian flag before they were set upon, beaten unconscious, run over, and thrown in canals. Hasan posted on X, in response to criticism, “Guy who supports genocide in Gaza & the killing of Arab kids is calling me a Nazi because I pointed out that his fellow genocide supporters from Israel went on a violent anti-Arab rampage in Amsterdam and he doesn’t want you to know that. He’d rather call everyone an antisemite.” Of course, the Israeli club supporters are not accused of having attacked anyone, nor did they stop pedestrians and demand to see their passports, as the Muslim pogromniks certainly did.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Disintegrating Language of Humanity, by David Rosenberg

The systematic inversion of language and moral standards to make room for Jew-hatred is a victory for barbarism

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Obama Isn’t Going Anywhere

The former president lost big on Nov. 5. But he doesn’t seem interested in leaving D.C., or American politics.

By Lee Smith

Donald Trump’s decisive victory last week was the only logical plot point in the most remarkable story in American political history. After the protagonist is humiliated, exiled and silenced, runs the gantlet of a justice system that means to imprison him for life, gets shot in the face, and escapes another murder attempt, he humbles himself, prays, cloaks himself, and walks among everyday Americans, as a fast-food worker then as a sanitation man, which shows him there are winners everywhere you look in America. And then he wins, too. It’s not an American story if he doesn’t win.

But the story of Trump’s rise and fall and redemption isn’t over yet. If he doesn’t drive Barack Obama out of Washington, D.C., and dismantle his private- and public-sector network, Trump can still ultimately lose. His first term was undermined by Obama allies in U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and there’s evidence that the heart of the resistance is now ensconced inside the Pentagon and already poised to fight him. This threatens not only the Trump presidency but also the stability of the country. After fulfilling campaign promises to close the borders, embark on a massive deportation program sending millions of illegal aliens home, and appoint an attorney general capable of restoring the rule of law, the president-elect’s top priority must be to bring an end to the Obama era.

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Presidents leave the capital city after their term in office to demonstrate their respect for one of the fundamental principles of our republic: the transfer of executive authority from one president to another. Obama stayed to underscore the opposite.

Woodrow Wilson, the only other ex-president who stayed put, had been incapacitated by a stroke midway through his second term and couldn’t leave. Obama announced at the start of his second term he wasn’t going away, and spent the first four years of his post-White House tenure to lead the resistance, and the next four as shadow president.

Obama never hid his role as the real center of power during Joe Biden’s term. When he retired the old man to make way for the candidate he’s preferred since at least 2019, Obama simply grabbed the mic and took center stage. The “Kamala Harris” campaign—whose “New Way Forward” slogan he premiered—was, in reality, just another Barack Obama campaign. Harris, who had never won a primary vote and withdrew from the 2020 race polling at 3%, had already been vetted and her record showed that she was unlikable, and more exposure made her even more unlikable. Pushing Harris on Democratic voters in the middle of a medical emergency—Biden’s cognitive meltdown during the June debate—and giving them no other choice was the only way to get her on track for the White House.

On election night, Obama stepped up to steady Harris voters—and demoralize Trump supporters—by promising a late-hour comeback similar to Biden’s four-years ago. “It took several days to count every ballot in 2020, and it’s very likely we won’t know the outcome tonight either,” he tweeted. “Let the process run its course. It takes time to count every ballot.”

Social media MAGA saw a repeat of the 2020 “red-mirage blue-shift” blackout when ballot-counting mysteriously shut down with Trump ahead, restarted hours later, typically without poll observers, and ended with Biden tallying 81 million votes—more than 15 million more votes than Clinton received in 2016. The reason it didn’t take days to announce a winner this time is because Trump lawyers won enough battles against Marc Elias and other Obama-allied lawyers to defend election integrity against procedures designed to facilitate fraud. And thus, in the end, Obama lost twice on election night: His puppet lost at the ballot box, and his legal team lost in court.

To obscure his culpability for the party’s loss, media accounts claim that what Obama wanted all along was an open primary—in reality a catastrophic scenario that would have entailed the party’s leading lights eviscerating each other three months before the election. And now, instead of installing another figurehead to occupy what in his estimation is the ceremonial position of president while he and his faction held real power, Obama must fight to stay relevant.

Following the election, he issued a statement shortly after Harris gave her concession speech. This marked another Obama first—no other former president has distributed his opinions to the public in the immediate aftermath of a presidential election, because no previous holder of that office intended to give the impression that he was still involved in deciding the fate of the nation.

“America,” Obama wrote, “has been through a lot over the last few years—from a historic pandemic and price hikes resulting from the pandemic, to rapid change and the feeling a lot of folks have that, no matter how hard they work, treading water is the best they can do. Those conditions have created headwinds for democratic incumbents around the world, and last night showed that America is not immune.”

The “folks,” in Obama’s condescending account, were not rejecting the transformative program he championed. Rather, they were reacting, likely irrationally, to phenomena that lacked cause or agency. There have been “price hikes resulting from the pandemic”—not historic levels of inflation caused by the Biden administration’s climate change agenda that has transferred trillions in middle-class wealth to Democratic Party donors and clients as well as the People’s Republic of China. There has been “rapid change”—which is to say the tens of millions of illegal aliens the Biden administration has ushered across the border in less than four years, spiking crime rates, suppressing the wages of U.S. workers, burdening taxpayers with the cost of education, housing, and other services for noncitizens. In any case, it’s not that this “change” wasn’t progress. It’s just that it may have happened too fast. And these “conditions,” which in Obama’s construction materialized out of the blue, “created headwinds for democratic incumbents around the world.”

No doubt this document was read, drafted, and revised dozens of times by a team of Obama loyalists to ensure that every word served a purpose. “Around the world” is intended to underscore the small “d” in democratic—Obama is not talking about an American political party but rather a political system. Trump didn’t beat Democrats, he thwarted democracy by defeating its defenders. In contrast to Harris, Trump is more like a right-wing fascist, or an authoritarian strongman, like Vladimir Putin, for instance. Thus, in the context of democracy, Trump’s presidency is not legitimate. And that calls for resistance.

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Immediately after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat, Obama set in motion the multi-pronged operation to undermine his successor. Obama told his FBI Director James Comey to continue the investigation, and surveillance, of the president-elect that was initiated while Trump was the GOP candidate. Further, the outgoing president directed CIA chief John Brennan to produce an official assessment asserting that Trump owed the presidency to Putin. By using the U.S. government’s official imprimatur to validate the conspiracy theory that Trump had been compromised by a foreign power, Obama delegitimized Trump’s presidency at its birth and divided the country. Now Obama is looking for another play, and it appears that it involves splitting the armed forces.

Last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directed Pentagon personnel to carry out a smooth transition and reminded them “to carry out the policy choices of its next Commander in Chief, and to obey all lawful orders from its civilian chain of command.”

It’s not the first time an outgoing Pentagon chief counseled his subordinates to abide by their oaths to the Constitution—what’s of potential concern is that the phrase “lawful orders” appears to contain a warning that some military officials’ decisions regarding lawful orders may be shaped by anti-Trump animus. What orders is Austin referring to? First, Trump has indicated he might use the military to assist in carrying out his incoming administration’s operation to deport illegal immigrants. Further, the Trump White House is planning to shrink the size of the bureaucracy, which also includes Pentagon officials. The resistance has already picked up on the cues left in Austin’s message.

For instance, in a report on Pentagon officials discussing how to respond in the event Trump issued unlawful orders, CNN correspondent Natasha Bertrand emphasized the threat implicit in Austin’s wording and wrote that “the US military will obey only lawful orders.” Bertrand famously drove the Trump-Russia narrative with leaks from intelligence officials, and in October 2020, she was first to report on the letter authored by 51 former spies falsely claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” That is, the CNN reporter is a delivery mechanism for anti-Trump information operations, and this particular op has been in the works for nearly a year.

n January, NBC News reported that former Obama officials and Democratic Party operatives were already plotting to derail Trump’s agenda under the pretext that he was aiming to use U.S. military to implement his political agenda. “We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to,” said Mary McCord, a former DOJ lawyer who oversaw its unlawful Trump-Russia probe. Another partner in the Pentagon op, according to the NBC story, is Democracy Forward, chaired by Marc Elias, who paid for the Trump-Russia dossier when he was a lawyer for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign.

In May and June, former Obama Pentagon official Rosa Brooks convened past Democratic and Republican officials to war-game scenarios for the postelection period. She’d done the same for the 2020 election with the Transition Integrity Project, a messaging campaign that prepared Democrats for the ballot count to drag on long past election day making Biden the winner and leaving Trump to contest the election. For this election, she joined with reporter Barton Gellman and the Democracy Futures Project to “forecast” the aftermath of election 2024.

The scenarios were made public on July 30 in an obvious media rollout, with stories in The Bulwark, where Brooks herself sketched the scenarios; The Washington Post, in a piece authored by Gellman; as well as The New Republic and The Guardian, the last of which gave the most detail on the various war games. One scenario posits the possibility “that Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act to go against street protests.” In other words, riots designed to block Trump policies would be as bad or worse than the spring and summer 2020 George Floyd riots when Trump reportedly entertained the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act. Those social justice demonstrations left 19 dead and caused billions of dollars worth of damage in dozens of cities across the country.

“In the course of the Insurrection Act tabletop exercise,” according to the Guardian report, “the person role-playing Trump initially met resistance from senior military figures who tried to cling to the Posse Comitatus Act barring federal troops from engaging in civilian law enforcement.” The account relayed that as the scenario unfolded, Trump fired the officers who disobeyed his orders and replaced them with officers who implemented them.

Last week’s CNN article picked up on the same themes and keywords: “The president’s powers are especially broad if he chooses to invoke the Insurrection Act, which states that under certain limited circumstances involved in the defense of constitutional rights, a president can deploy troops domestically unilaterally,” wrote Bertrand. “A separate law—the Posse Comitatus Act—seeks to curb the use of the military to enforce laws unless authorized by Congress. But the law has exceptions for rebellion and terrorism, which ultimately gives the president broad leeway in deciding if and when to invoke [the] Insurrection Act.”

With this, the tabletop exercises and the communications component for the anti-Trump Pentagon op are in order. Does the resistance really intend to move pieces in place to split the military or are they just bluffing to get Trump to back off on campaign promises that will topple two of its pillars? It might seem strange to threaten to destabilize the country on behalf of defense bureaucrats and illegal aliens, but the former constitute a crucial part of Obama’s network, and giving the latter the vote, as Trump’s landslide victory shows, may be the Democrats’ best chance to win national elections in the near future. It’s tempting to read the Brooks scenarios and the CNN report as resistance porn—a performance of the rituals and motions that this class has accustomed itself to over the course of the past eight years, as it now braces for the return of the president it did its best and failed to destroy.

Would Obama fracture the military to once again cripple Trump’s term in office? The former president is in a decidedly weaker position and facing a battle-hardened Trump. Still, it would be reckless to assume the best from the man who already proved his willingness to weaponize the national security apparatus against his political opponent. The president-elect shouldn’t take any chances.