Trump goes nuclear for Israel

The TOI correspondent from Washington: Demonstrating a startling contrast to the restraint advocated to Israel by US President Joe Biden and Washington's European allies, MAGA maverick Donald Trump wants the Jewish state to hit Iran's nuclear facilities first and "worry about the rest later."

Speaking at campaign event in North Carolina on Friday, Trump ridiculed Biden's advice to Israel to exercise proportional response to the Iran's 200- missile attack, saying, "his answer should have been "'Hit the nuclear first, worry about the rest later.' It was not clear if the "rest" referred to other facilities or to the consequences.

Trump made similar comments in an interview with Fox News on Thursday, saying Biden's response on Israel attacking Iran was the "craziest thing I’ve ever heard," arguing, "soon they will have nuclear weapons and then you will have problems."

Foreign policy traditionalists in turn saw Trump's suggestion as crazy considering the potential fall-out from hitting a nuclear site. By some accounts, Iran is only a year or two, if not a few months, from a working nuclear weapon.

Trump has previously shown a cavalier -- and sometimes bizarre -- approach to matters nuclear even while expressing awe about its power. During his Presidency he boasted about having a bigger nuclear button than North Korea and suggested nuking hurricanes to stop them from reaching the United States.

Biden on Wednesday expressed his opposition to Israel striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, in response to the firing of nearly 200 Iranian missiles towards Israel. “We’ll be discussing with the Israelis what they’re going to do,” he said, adding that all G7 members agree Israel has “a right to respond, but they should respond in proportion.”

But for a movement that is largely anti-war, Trump's MAGA surrogates surprisingly pitched for a hardball Israeli response against the backdrop of the Presidential election. Some of it was rooted in Israel's existential crisis as a Jewish state surrounded by Arab Muslim nations.

“For the sake of our friends in Israel, we cannot allow the world to miscalculate Iran, just as it did with Hitler and the Nazis. Would a proportional response be launching 200 ballistic missiles from Israel into Iran, mimicking what the Iranians did to Israel?" asked Trump factotum Senator Lindsey Graham

“To my friends in Israel, one holocaust directed at the Jewish people is enough. Do what you have to do to defend yourselves against those who would kill you simply because you are Jewish," he added.

There was also a domestic political connection to the issue. Jews constitute only 2.4% of the US adult population, but they are more likely to vote than the general registered voting population and to make political donations. A survey by the Jewish Democratic Council of America last month showed Jewish vote falling 68-25 for Kamala Harris, causing a Trump lament that Jews will be partly to blame if he loses.

Kamala Harris, whose husband Doug Emhoff is Jewish, is doing a tightrope walk balancing traditional US support for Israel while also advocating restraint to save civilian lives.

She was in Michigan -- a battleground state -- on Friday meeting several Muslim groups in a state which has more than 300,000 Muslim-American votes. At the other end, Pennsylvania, which also a battleground, also has about 300,000 voting-age Jews. In 2020, Biden won Michigan by 154,000 votes and Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes.