Michelle Goldberg has a column up in the Times about Joe Kent’s resignation letter which I addressed yesterday below. There’s a lot I agree with. But the part I don’t is contained in the headline itself: “Joe Kent’s Resignation Letter Is Dangerous Because It’s Half True.” The phrasing of something being “half true” is always a complicated one and one that ends up almost always being misleading. Something that is “half true” is of course better termed “untrue.” That’s how true and untrue work. Few things are categorically 100% untrue. And that is the case here. Michelle I think gets closer to the mark in this line down into the piece …
A major distortion in Kent’s letter is that it presents Trump as a naïve victim of the Israelis rather than an eager collaborator.
This is the crux of the issue, as I argued in my piece. Trump is a collaborator in this, not some victim. And that to me is the entirety of the matter. If some foreign head of state pitches our president on something, and our president thinks it’s a great idea and does it, that is 100% on him. Indeed, in this case, this isn’t even really a matter of pitching anyone. Donald Trump is on a rapidly-expanding regime change spree. He got surprisingly lucky in Venezuela and decided he wanted to do it again. While we’re sinking in Iran, he is escalating in Cuba. The administration sent out word yesterday that for Cuba the price of a serious conversation with the United States is their head of state stepping down. Who’s convincing Trump on this? The Cuban emigres in Miami? They’ve been making that case since 1960.
Let me reiterate that I don’t think Michelle and I are disagreeing on much here. It’s really a matter of wording. Also, the fine points of what’s true and not doesn’t matter all that much in terms of the danger all of this poses to American Jews who are now in cross-currents between rising antisemitism on the left and the right. But these fine points of how we describe things, even fine points of wording, matter.
