Trump's real mistake? Not running in Israel. And we've got just the party for him

If only he would consider running with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud. He would be perfect. He’d fit right in. It’s not just the comb-over and the billions. It’s the racism.

Ha’aretz

Donald Trump has made a mistake.

No, the error was not the speech in which he announced his candidacy for the presidency, stating that the migrants whom he said Mexico was sending across the border into the United States were rapists.

“They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists,” he declared, adding that “some, I assume, are good people.”

Nor was Trump‘s misstep a subsequent series of interviews in which was given a chance to clarify his remarks – and made them incalculably worse.

“I love the Mexican people. I do business with the Mexican people, but you have people coming through the border that are from all over. And they’re bad. They’re really bad,” he said Sunday.

“You have people coming in, and I’m not just saying Mexicans, I’m talking about people that are from all over that are killers and rapists and they’re coming into this country.”

No, no mistake here. The proof? Since the incendiary remarks, a recent poll showed Trump rocketing into second place among 19 Republicans running for president in the key primary state of New Hampshire, streaking past Mario Rubio and other GOP stars to challenge front-runner Jeb Bush.

Still, a powerful backlash appears to be building, not only among outraged Latinos, but also a broad swath of the Republican party, that will need Hispanic votes and wide moderate support in order to take back the White House in 2016.

The same opinion survey that showed Trump in second place, also asked prospective Republican voters which candidate they would personally rule out as a nominee. Nearly one of every four named Trump – overwhelmingly the candidate engendering the most internal GOP opposition.

When you think about it, Trump’s real mistake is only natural: He’s running in the wrong party. In the wrong country.

He should be here in Israel. Have we got the party for him.

If only he would consider running with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud. He would be perfect. He’d fit right in. It’s not just the comb-over and the billions. It’s not just that Trump issued a vigorous video endorsement of Netanyahu during the last election campaign.

It’s the racism.

Take the warnings about the lethal criminality of migrants and what they could do to the country. The Likud’s Miri Regev parlayed her comparisons of African migrants crossing the southern border to a “cancer in the nation’s body,” straight into the Ministry of Culture.

Then there is the suggestion that certain minorities do not really deserve citizenship, as Deputy Interior Minister Yaron Mazuz made clear in the Knesset last week. “We’re doing you a favor that you’re even sitting here,” he yelled, urging Arab MKs to hand back their identity cards, the badge of Israeli citizenship.

And then there’s the built-in public relations mechanism. Trump, a reality show host and high-flying beauty pageant magnate until NBC cut ties with him over the remarks, could only envy the treatment that the interests of billionaire businessmen receive from Sheldon Adelson’s daily Israel Hayom, with its impressive lineup of bootlickers, confabulators and verbal courtesans.

Exalting Netanyahu’s relentless support for a closely held natural gas monopoly, Israel Hayom columnist Haim Shine wrote this week of the “talented, valorous, daring entrepreneurs who have invested capital in revealing an abundance of gas reserves hidden in our very midst beneath the sea” – heroes whose deeds could turn Israel into an “energy superpower.”

Trump, who trades on his stature and acumen as a billionaire, could not but appreciate Shine’s suggestions that the increasingly pro-monopoly gas deal will make all Israelis well-off.

Shine wrote that the “small number of demonstrators” at a Saturday night protest – in which, in fact, thousands voiced opposition to the deal – “proves that the public is tired of talk, and wants to see the gas pumping profuse sums [of money] toward their betterment and well-being.”

Most of all, perhaps, Trump – who affects the bare-knuckles gruff of a self-made man, but was born into great wealth as the son of a multi-millionaire New York real estate magnate – can appreciate the extent to which history can be entirely re-written and then given away free on street corners nationwide:

“David Ben-Gurion, a leader of the generation of founders, was no socialist,” writes Shine, in an assertion which turns the old kibbutznik and admirer of Lenin into a made-over Ayn Rand-ready version of Bibi himself.

“Ben-Gurion ruled out the concepts of equality and the commune,” he writes. “He knew that the spirit, creativity, talent and daring of the Jews must not be imprisoned within template frameworks which sanctify mediocrity.”

Trump might also identify with the extent that Shine goes on to explode his own argument, while assiduously deepening existing rifts in society to shore up his position.

“Anyone who tries to bring the state of Israel back to the era of the rule of socialism is blinding the eyes of the public,” he says of critics of the deal to create a private gas cartel to be governmentally protected and unregulated for decades.

“Many among us have not forgotten the workings of the socialist Mapai party [later the Labor Party, originally co-founded and run for decades by, yes, Ben-Gurion], which over the years created enormous inequality within Israeli society.”

Pumping the culture war in an attempt to whip up pro-Likud sentiment among Mizrachi Israelis, who were in many cases treated poorly by largely Ashkenazi Mapai’niks, Shine shifts into high dudgeon.

“In Israel there are more than a million citizens who experienced on their own flesh the message of oppressive and atrophied Marxism. Not one of them wants to turn the wheel back.”

“The conclusion is clear,” Shine argues, using the Hebrew equivalent of “step on it” in an example of inadvertent self-description, and perhaps, of the Trump effect: “Give gas.”