It is a sport like Whack-a-Mole. Players follow every Trump word, gesture, movement — and, as soon as they spot the thing, they whack at it, presumably to get a point or a “like” or a “follower” or a smiley emoji.
It stinks, but this is an underbelly of society. I went through it myself at one rabbinic position I held briefly during my 32-year (so far) rabbinic career. I had been hired by a congregation’s “rabbinic search committee,” and the committee was split. A solid majority loved my wife, Ellen of blessed memory, and they liked me enough. I was the rabbi they were looking for. But a distinct, if not distinguished, minority absolutely hated me.
The Zelensky Impeachment. We now know that it was the Bidens who grifted their way through the Ukrainian economy.
That is not surprising, I guess. I take my stands and speak my mind. Most people like encountering such a person; some people hate it. Read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged and you will get the idea. Still, the majority ruled, and I was retained.
Within two weeks, the opposition secretly coalesced and laid out a methodical strategy to get me fired. They would work to persuade synagogue members to cancel their memberships, an important component of shul funding.
I launched a Youth Program, and they worked to persuade parents not to send their kids. (Crazy, right?) I started a weekly program that I myself had experienced a few years earlier with my son, and we loved it. It was called “Parents and Kids Torah Learning,” and parents would come to the synagogue with their kids every Saturday night to devote an hour to studying some Bible together, or parents would help their sons and daughters with homework assigned by their religious-studies teachers at the Jewish school. (READ MORE from Dov Fischer: Trump’s Excellent History-Changing Populist Republican Convention)
Toward the end of the hour, I would tell a Bible story, and then Ellen would arrive with boxes of pizza. The kids loved it. We even upped it a notch: the boy and girl who attended most frequently got to spend an entire day at Disneyland with the rabbi and his wife, and ended the night by stopping by our home for Ellen’s (amazing) chocolate chip cookies.
When word got out that the project was booming, the satans plotted to kill it. They actually convinced parents to stop coming, stop bringing their kids. One father and grandfather showed up with their son/grandson and soon were getting yelled at in public by the lead Satan for breaking the boycott. “But [name of boy] loves this thing. He talks about it all week.”
The satans excluded the guy from their inner circle. He could not take the social isolation, so he stopped bringing his son (a darling kid). There is a book about such people, written by a Christian pastor, based on similar situations in Protestant churches, called Clergy Killers.
A pastor friend recommended it to me when he and I shared our “Twilight Zone” moments. Others in that genre: Ten Ways to Kill a Pastor and Pastor Abusers. I share one anecdotal example that brings me back to Trump’s TDS haters:
In a Shabbat sermon, I was discussing the Biblical account of Avraham’s (Abraham’s) effort to marry off his son, Yitzchak (Isaac), to a woman worthy of becoming the second Matriarch of the Jewish people. Toward that end, Avraham sent his majordomo, Eliezer, from Canaan back to Charan, where Avraham was born and where his extended family lived.
Eliezer went by camel, laden with gifts of wealth, which he would offer to a family whose daughter would be the right one. However, Eliezer was concerned that, as a simple majordomo, he was hardly qualified to pick such a perfect wife for both Yitzchak and the future Jewish people. Therefore, he boldly endeavored to make a deal with G-d:
“Here I stand by the spring as the daughters of the townspeople come out to draw water; let the maiden to whom I say, ‘Please, lower your jar that I may drink,’ and who replies, ‘Drink, and I will also water your camels’ — let her be the one whom You have decreed for Your servant Isaac. Thereby shall I know that You have dealt graciously with my master.” (Genesis 24:13-14)
Continuing with my sermon, I related that Rivkah (Rebecca) emerged and indeed unknowingly fulfilled the prophecy. She brought Eliezer water, and then — despite the physical challenge amid the heat of the day — this young girl walked all the way back to the well, drew more water, and carried that heavy bucket a distance to slake the camel’s thirst. I then threw in the kind of quip that has trademarked me for some fifty years. I said, “Now that’s someone who would walk a mile for a camel.”
(If you are of an age when that company advertised regularly on TV, radio, and in newspapers, you will catch the reference.)
Well, the sermon was well received, and the quip drew some giggles. But the satans went to work. Soon enough, an emergency meeting of the synagogue’s executive board was called — an emergency meeting on these charges: “The rabbi is publicly encouraging kids in shul to start smoking cigarettes.”
End of story. Point made.
I think back to that garbage every time I see or hear the mainstream leftist media attack Donald Trump over every minor nothing they can swat at. They search and dig to find any blip they can. When they can’t find a thing, they fabricate it from thin air.
The Russian collusion with Putin? That tied him up for two years. Schiff, the despicable liar who soon will be a California Senator, swore he had documentary proof of it. Of course it was absurd! Honestly, even if you hate Trump, why would Putin help Trump get elected over Hillary? It makes no sense.
Putin owns the Clintons. And they are so weak. Remember the American ambassador in Libya on her watch? Trump is such a tough sonovogun. Why would Putin want Trump in the White House? Indeed, Trump’s election stopped Putin’s designs on Ukraine for four years.
One lie after another, grasping at straws. The Zelensky Impeachment. We now know that it was the Bidens who grifted their way through the Ukrainian economy. Then the second impeachment. All were conducted at Christmas time, aimed at humiliating and destroying Trump.
The irony: If things continue as they hopefully seem, history instead will report not that he is the only president in American history to have been impeached twice but that he was twice impeached by a corrupt Congress voting on straight party lines and yet was then reelected by the American people to serve as president again while (i) Nancy Pelosi, the Wannabe Kingslayer, ended up spending her last days trying instead to take down her own party’s president, and (ii) Liz Cheney was voted out of Congress by her electorate and went on to a career in … (What does she do anyway?)
It continues after President Trump’s amazing Republican National Convention success. Every speech was great, from all sectors of the American social spectrum. The energy was contagious. A very solid Vice Presidential choice. A great family that many, many, many people wish they could say about their own kids. And yet the media satans went right to work. (READ MORE: The Democrats’ Panic Reveals Vance’s Strength)
Yes, let’s all be fair: He spoke too long. And he should have stuck more to the perfectly scripted speech, which was knocking home runs all over the place and setting off all the lights and bells on the pinball machines. The moving call for unity, the gripping account of the assassination attempt, the emotional homage to the heroic firefighter, Corey Comperatore. He shouldn’t have ad-libbed as much as he did. True is true; fair is fair. A few ad-libs, OK. Trump must be Trump. If the satans had focused their criticisms there, in moderation, OK.
But the satans’ hatred never stops. They always search and scrounge, hunting for sound-bites to take out of context and then to attack or mock. So they ripped him for mentioning Hannibal Lecter. Really, that’s your best shot?
The reference was valid: countries like Venezuela and El Salvador are releasing sickos and nut jobs from their mental institutions and, with the Biden-Kamala porous border, sending them here, where they seize, rape, and murder American females like Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, and Jocelyn Nungaray.
They are not literally sending cannibals (like those who ate Biden’s uncle?) but indeed are sending mental cases who rape and murder. Trump was speaking figuratively, to impress an image with a New Yorker’s style of showmanship, and then the satans mangled his words to mischaracterize them.
Or when he said that Kim Jong Un misses him. They take that out of context and make it sinister. He obviously was quipping and kidding. That is how New York humor works. My congregants and readers know I do that, too. I am a Jew from Brooklyn. That’s how we Outer Borough types are. And leftists know it darn well because, when it is a leftist from Brooklyn, they laugh at his Curb Your Enthusiasm schtick for twelve annual seasons.
This despite the fact that Larry makes fun of blacks (with “Black Leon” the most stereotypical Black imaginable, hyper-sexed, every sentence an “MF,” since Amos and Andy), and mocks “fat people” and people in wheelchairs and Hispanic toll collectors and maids. From Larry, all the progressive woke opinion makers laugh and laugh. But when Trump jokes far less offensively, they call him a “racist” and berate him. Shame on them.
It is like the satans I encountered during that one isolated bizarre three-year period at that temple. Each and every sentence, quip, pun, and aside was scrutinized as a possible basis to fire me. It was terribly annoying. But I had a very sweet and resolute wife, my own strong disposition, and I came out OK.
I ended up with a fabulously better congregation through these past 19 years; freedom at the pulpit, freedom to expand by starting writing honestly and forthrightly here, freedom to teach law for twenty years, and freedom to thank G-d for endowing the satans with the wisdom to agree to a six-figure settlement.
Even so, I never had to put up with the persecution President Trump has faced: investigations based on cruel and vicious lies from the day he assumed office, two impeachments based on nothing, lawfare in three states and the District of Columbia — which is not a state — gag orders, bans from social media, efforts to shame him publicly in the eyes of his wife and children, and a gunshot at him. May He come out of it not only “OK” but as the 47th President.
If finding fault in Trump is a sport, those who play it are vicious and evil sorts. And they keep losing at their own game.
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