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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 might approve of. 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.
Many Israelis had assumed that Netanyahu would find a way to nonetheless elegantly step aside and tend to his legal woes. This was a naïve throwback to the days when political leaders cared about decorum—cared 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.
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 doubtless will.
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—the "elites."
In aid of this ploy, Netanyahu has brilliantly deployed a related argument: that the system arrayed against him—like the legal system in most countries—is "unelected."
The argument essentially says that if Al Capone or Charles Manson can be elected president, then they're president. The people have spoken.
And here's the thing: the argument works.
Netanyahu has recently won an election that returned him to power after a year and a half in opposition. He is currently engaged, as a prime minister, in an effort to change the legal system to enable a simple majority in the parliament to overturn court decisions.
The country is, as you might have read, up in arms. People who represent everything good about Israel—its world-beating high-tech sector, its dynamic culture, its academia, its powerful security services—are in a state of righteous rage.
Do they represent the majority? Polls say yes, they do. Can Netanyahu chip away at that with eloquent flim-flam? History says yes, he can.
Does it matter that this level of skullduggery is just not done? To Netanyahu it plainly does not.
So, the question for Americans is whether Trump will similarly try to turn his legal troubles into votes. Whether he will try to claim—as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did defiantly—that the Manhattan district attorney is funded and directed by George Soros, the bogeyman of the populist right all over the world these days and a stand-in for antisemitic tropes.
The interesting thing is that almost no one in American doubts that Trump will tap almost any nonsense for political gain—but it might not hurt him in the least.
There is a bigger problem here than Trump—or Netanyahu. We are in the throes of a crisis in Western society.
Dan Perry is managing partner of the New York-based communications firm Thunder11. He is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
