You knew he couldn't keep his big trap shut, didn't you?

Bodies of murdered babies, children, women and men were still on the ground wrapped in blue blankets and tarps in Kibbutz collectives and villages across southern Israel yesterday when Donald Trump took the stage at a campaign rally in West Palm Beach and made his first public comments after the onslaught of Hamas militants on Saturday that killed more than 1,200 Israeli citizens.  True to form, he blamed the carnage on Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, whom he called “a jerk.” 

“They have a national defense minister or somebody saying, ‘I hope Hezbollah doesn’t attack us from the north,’” Trump told his crowd.  “So the following morning, they attacked… If you listen to this jerk, you would attack from the north because he said, ‘That’s our weak spot.’ When they have people saying the wrong things, everything they say is being digested by these people because they’re vicious and they’re smart,” Trump said of Hezbollah, which fired 15 missiles and an anti-tank guided rocket across Israel’s border with Lebanon on Tuesday.  “I said, ‘Wait a minute, Hezbollah is very smart. They’re all very smart. — The press doesn’t like it when I say that. I said that President Xi of China — 1.4 billion people. He controls it with an iron fist. — I said, ‘he’s a very smart man.’ They killed me the next day.”

Recall that Trump called Russian President Vladimir Putin “pretty smart” in a speech he gave in Palm Beach on the day Russia launched its attack on Ukraine in 2022.  “I mean, he’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.”  Trump went on to say that Putin wouldn’t have invaded if he was still president.  He said much the same thing about the attack on Israel last Saturday, that Hamas wouldn’t have launched its attack if he was still president: “If the election wasn’t rigged, there would be nobody even thinking about going into Israel.”

Even with an all-out war looming in Israel and the danger of a larger war breaking out across the Middle East, it’s all about him.  Trump took time from his criticism of Netanyahu to brag about his administration’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force in 2020 and brought up an old grudge against Netanyahu for not helping the U.S. in the attack inside Iran.  “I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. That was a very terrible thing. We were very disappointed, but we did the job ourselves, and it was absolute precision, magnificent, beautiful job,” he said. “Then Bibi tried to take credit for it. That didn’t make me feel too good. But that’s all right.”

Acts of disloyalty against Trump are always “all right” after he has hit back at the person who betrayed him because Trump is such a big, forgiving man.

 The White House called Trump’s remarks at his political rally “dangerous and unhinged.”  White House Deputy Press Secretary Bates went on, “It’s completely lost on us why any American would ever praise an Iran-backed terrorist organization as ‘smart’ or have any objection to the United States warning terrorists not to attack Israel.  Especially now as Israel is fighting back against one of the worst acts of mass murder in the country’s history,” Bates added. “This is a time for all of us to stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel against ‘unadulterated evil.’ That’s what President Biden is doing as commander in chief.”

On Tuesday, President Biden gave an address from the White House calling the Hamas attack on Israel “pure evil,” and compared the unprovoked attack to the Holocaust. “Parents butchered, using their bodies to try to protect their children; stomach-turning reports of babies being killed; entire families slain; young people massacred while attending a musical festival; women raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies,” Biden said, looking grimly into the camera as he gripped the sides of his lectern.  Biden added a stern warning to Iran, a backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, if they are thinking of getting involved in the conflict: “Don’t.” 

Biden has ordered a second aircraft carrier group into the Eastern Mediterranean to join the strike group led by the USS Gerald Ford, which has already arrived in the region as a show of force in support of Israel.

Meanwhile, Trump’s trial in New York City continues on charges of falsifying financial reports in order to obtain more favorable terms on loans and insurance policies.  He is also under indictment in Florida, Washington D.C., and Georgia on multiple felony counts, including mishandling top-secret national security documents, obstruction of justice, and attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It’s the kind of regular stuff former presidents do while they engage in old grudges against the presidents of allied nations whose countries are under attack and more than a thousand of their citizens have been murdered.  What’s more important, anyway?  Supporting an ally under attack, or taking out your petty grievances in tirades at campaign rallies?

We got our answer in West Palm Beach yesterday.