How America's 'Trumpified Republican Party' parallels Israel's Netanyahu right: libertarian

03 April 2023

On Thursday, March 30, the United States experienced a major political bombshell when the news broke that a New York City grand jury had indicted former President Donald Trump in connection with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Jr.'s investigation of alleged hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump's arraignment is scheduled for this Tuesday, April 4.

Meanwhile, in Israel, right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been investigated for fraud and bribery allegations — none of which prevented him from becoming prime minister again. Netanyahu's hardcore supporters in Israel are unfazed by those allegations, not unlike Trump's diehard MAGA base in the United States.

Among Israelis, Netanyahu is as polarizing a figure as Trump has been among Americans. And he has his share of scathing critics as well as passionate, unwavering supporters.

In an episode of The Bulwark's "Beg to Differ" podcast posted on March 31, host Mona Charen (a Never Trump conservative and former Nancy Reagan speechwriter) discusses the parallels between Trump and Netanyahu with guest Damon Linker (who describes himself as a critic of both the "illiberal right" and the "woke left").

Linker told Charen, "There is a lot of room for reasonable reform of the Supreme Court in Israel. The problem is that the right-wing government of Netanyahu has proposed a rather extreme version of reform that would effectively give the majority in the Knesset the power to overrule verdicts of the Court, which would enable Netanyahu's own coalition to basically vacate his own trials, which sounds pretty corrupt…. It is remarkable how similar the arguments that the right makes about the Israeli Supreme Court are to the arguments that the kind of Trumpified Republican Party makes about the administrative state. In both cases, you have a harder right coalition of forces in the society that wants to make more substantial changes to the country, at the level of both politics and culture."

Linker stressed that the Netanyahu right is a minority in Israel just as the MAGA right is a minority in the United States, albeit a very vocal minority.

"The current Israeli government has over 50 percent of the Knesset," Linker told Charen, "but it actually won slightly less than 50 percent of the votes. And, of course, in our country, we had the Trump presidency, where he had all the powers of the presidency and yet lost the popular vote…. So, you have a harder right in both countries that wants to undertake fairly big, sweeping reforms, and yet, does not have the popular mandate to back that up…. You're seeing versions of this kind of a fight in many of the countries that are dealing with a new, resurgent populist right — not only in Israel and the United States, but Brazil, Hungary…. Poland, the Czech Republic for a while, and India."

Read a transcript of the podcast at this link.

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