How will Trump's indictment play out? Look to Netanyahu
Many thought Trump's good buddy would be harmed by being indicted; in the age of populist war on the elites, reality proved them wrong
Many Americans will be asking themselves this weekend how the indictment of former President Donald Trump will influence their country’s future. Will he remain one of the two main candidates for the presidency in 2024? They might cast their gaze eastward, to Israel and its own criminal defendant-in-chief, Trump’s good buddy Benjamin Netanyahu.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, of course, is on trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, in three different cases. One involves allegedly receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts from favor-seeking billionaires. Another involves alleged skullduggery with Israel’s main publisher. A third involves alleged major regulatory favors to the owner of a major website in exchange for favorable coverage.
The charges had been brewing since late 2016, and in December 2018 the state prosecution recommended indictment. By that point Netanyahu was facing a reelection vote a few months down the line, and there was quite a to-do about how that should affect the criminal proceedings.
Netanyahu immediately claimed the charges were politically motivated – a move that Trump surely approved of and indeed is replicating today. Many of his acolytes in the media and the political scene flooded the discourse with a narrative involving a shadowy cabal who cannot brook conservatives in power.
In February 2019, two months before the election, the Supreme Court rejected a petition by Netanyahu’s Likud Party to stall the proceedings. The attorney general then announced that he had accepted the recommendations to indict “pending a hearing” that would happen months down the road. That basically meant that Netanyahu would be indicted. And sure enough, he has been.
That created a real precedent and raised two massive questions for Israelis.
The first was whether there is a legal position on a candidate for the top leadership position being on trial. Should the trial be stopped? Should the candidacy be stopped?
In both countries, people have strong feelings on both what should be the case and what is the case. But in Israel at least, the situation is murky to be sure. You cannot be a Cabinet minister—or even a mayor—on trial, but the Supreme Court ruled in Netanyahu’s favor that a prime minister can indeed stand trial while serving.
Many Israelis had assumed that Netanyahu would find a way to nonetheless elegantly step aside and tend to his legal woes. Anything else seemed absurd in a country where probity had mattered and Yitzhak Rabin once resigned as PM because of an illegal bank account with a few dollars in it. This was a naïve throwback to the days when political leaders cared about decorum—about the things that “simply aren’t done.”
You know what else isn’t done? Saying things like: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Or lying as blithely as Trump does. Or trying to shake down the Ukrainian president for dirt on Joe Biden. Or coddling Russian President Vladimir Putin and Korean leader Kim Jong Un while dissing NATO. It would appear that now, such things are actually done.
So Netanyahu blithely proceeded to run anyway, raising the second massive question: How would the public react? These were uncharted waters—a precedent was at hand!
At first, polls suggested Netanyahu would pay the price it seemed he richly deserved. Some liberals began to count their chickens. But they did not take into account the power of the populist message that Netanyahu intended to summon up, like Trump is doing now and in a way has always done.
Netanyahu began to agitate against the police, the prosecution, and the courts. He insistently, determinedly, and expertly promoted a narrative that he had been set up by a liberal deep state that hated conservatives.
The claims were preposterous to anyone who read the indictments or knew the history of the officials in question: both the police chief and attorney general were deeply religious Jews considered friendly to the right.
But none of that mattered, because there was something far more potent than the facts for Netanyahu to harness: hatred of the elites.
All over the world, in this tumultuous time—a time defined by tremendous inequality and widespread uncertainty—ordinary people are vulnerable to efforts to turn them against the successful. Against the so-called “elites.” Against people who have not suffered from globalization and tech disruption and immigration.
In aid of this ploy, Netanyahu brilliantly deployed a related argument: that the system arrayed against him—like the legal system in most countries—is “unelected.”
Here’s how.
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