Tober said:
The reason we got in the current situation is because an appartheid political wing in Israel did well in the last election is now part of Netayahu's cabinet. A part of the government that wants to genocide the palastinians and supports extending on the West Bank. If you want to blame Trump for that, go ahead. I think it's a pretty big though loop to jump through. Russia invaded Ukraine after Trump left remember. The catalyst was to open the door for Ukraine to NATO that escalated the situation. But just as the above, sure we can speak through thought loops to blame Trump for that. That kind of reasoning can go any way and leaves us blind for the facts. |
And that apartheid political wing gained support with Trump's 'help'.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Israel
In late 2018, negotiations with Israel for a long-term truce were underway and continued until the announcement in January 2020 of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump’s peace plan, which was embraced by Israel as a path forward but dismissed by the Palestinians as a nonstarter.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-27/what-netanyahu-and-israelis-learned-from-the-trump-playbook
![](https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/ede9d96/2147483647/strip/true/crop/5464x3640+0+0/resize/1200x799!/format/webp/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F21%2Ff0%2Fadc9a9374561932631fb834a2d29%2Fisrael-netanyahu-trump-62510.jpg)
Netanyahu portrayed his bromance with Trump as the essential factor in the president’s many unreciprocated concessions to Israel — moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem; recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights; pulling the United States out of the Iran nuclear arms deal; ignoring and undermining the Palestinian Authority.
And Netanyahu was hardly taking a risk in conflating himself with Trump. A Pew Research Center poll in early 2020 found that 71% of Israelis approved of Trump. In other words, Israeli support for Trump exceeded by roughly 20 points the one-half share of Israeli voters who backed Netanyahu’s various right-wing coalitions in the last five Knesset elections.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/26/politics/trump-putin-ukraine/index.html
Experts say Trump’s actions weakened Ukraine, divided NATO, emboldened Putin and helped get us to where we are today. And even with Trump no longer in office, his impact lives on in the form of Putin-friendly commentary in conservative media and from some Republican lawmakers.
“One of the key reasons Putin probably felt comfortable launching the invasion of Ukraine was the extent to which the West has been weakened and destabilized, and democracy undermined, and political divisions sown, in the five years since he attacked our election in 2016,” said Garrett Graff, a historian and journalist with expertise in national security and Cold War issues.
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/08/1085023029/russias-invasion-puts-a-new-light-on-trumps-ukraine-pressure-campaign
Then-President Donald Trump was withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in aid for Ukraine's defense as he was asking its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to investigate Trump's potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter Biden. That 2019 call got Trump impeached. But the Senate acquitted him, and he dismissed the controversy as a politically motivated hit job — and his base went along. Now, with Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine and Zelenskyy being hailed around the world as a hero for his resolve, that call is put into a very different light.
"There's just a lot of evidence that Trump was wrong on this issue [Ukraine] and that in many ways, we undermined the NATO alliance and we undermined Zelenskyy's position in the eyes of Russia and Putin," said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist and former senior adviser on Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.
Trump has shifted his positions on the war in Ukraine. Shortly before Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion, Trump called Putin "smart" and "savvy" because Putin had declared portions of Ukraine "independent," something Putin had no right to do.
After the invasion began, Trump defended saying that Putin was "smart," then called President Biden "weak" and described NATO countries as "not so smart." "The problem is not that Putin is smart — which of course he is smart," Trump told a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference. "But the real problem is that our leaders are dumb. Dumb. So dumb."
https://academic.oup.com/ia/article/99/4/1595/7191374
Dives into the incoherency of Trump's foreign policies, his stance on Crimea (seeming to favor letting Russia have it) and his efforts to get Russia back into the G8 not mentioning Russia was expelled for annexing Crimea.
Yes Trumped fucked up bad. He turned the USA into a laughing stock, making Putin feel confident he could rush into Ukraine and Netanyahu confident to keep escalating tensions in the West Bank and East Jerusalem which led to October 7th.