WASHINGTON – As Donald Trump himself admits, Joe Biden passed him last week.
As the former president walked into a New York courthouse where his business empire faces a civil lawsuit that could cripple it, he admitted he “hadn’t thought” about going to Israel but “maybe I’ll go there.”
At this moment, the current president of the country was already on board Air Force One, heading to Tel Aviv.
It is clear that Trump’s attention is not only focused on the Middle East crisis. With 91 separate criminal charges in multiple jurisdictions, court appearances where journalists ask him for his reaction to events in developing countries could become a permanent feature of the 2024 US election campaign.
Trump’s legal danger increased significantly last week after his former lawyer, Sidney Powell, pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to interfere with the 2020 election in Georgia. As a result of the settlement, she will pay a $6,000 fine, write a letter of apology to state voters and, devastatingly for Trump, testify in future trials against him and his alleged associates.
“This is the start of big problems for him,” said Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey. “If Donald Trump becomes our nominee,” Christie added, “he will spend more time defending himself in courtrooms and against the allegations of his former allies than campaigning against Joe Biden and the Democrats.”
When Trump addressed the crisis in Israel last week, he made several false claims that it was being funded by the United States. In his inaccurate report, he directly links the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas attacks to the release of $6 billion in frozen oil shipments to Iran as part of a prisoner swap between Washington and Tehran last month.
In fact, these frozen funds remain in blocked bank accounts in Qatar and Switzerland specifically designated for food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies. John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, says that “not a single dinar of these funds went to Iran” and stressed that the US government is closely monitoring the accounts.
Of course, Republican voters shouldn’t let the facts get in the way of Trump’s story. But his repeated insistence that the current conflict would “never happen to me” does not explain how he could lead a future government through a similar crisis. He emphasizes one thing he will not do: provide humanitarian aid to Gaza. Trump dismissed Biden’s decision to send $106 million in humanitarian aid to help civilians as “totally inappropriate” but again offered no alternative vision.
Biden’s White House team believes the president’s extremely risky decision to travel to Israel paid off. That allowed him to urge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to think twice before launching a ground invasion of Gaza, which Biden fears could result in significant civilian casualties. This gave him the opportunity to work with the Qataris to free two Americans held hostage by Hamas. It also gave the president the opportunity to portray himself as a fearless military leader.
Hours after his return to Washington, Biden’s televised address last Thursday linked his recent visits to Kyiv and Tel Aviv – both in the midst of ongoing military operations. He called on Americans to bury their differences and unite in the idea that America remains a “beacon for the world,” warning that the global “costs and threats” to the United States will continue to grow.
Deputy White House Press Secretary Andrew Bates on his personal social media account compared the energetic Biden, who was bold enough to “visit two war zones,” with Trump, who — while president — “refused to go to opposition Iraq because I feared for his safety.” ‘. It’s a topic Biden’s team is expected to return to as the presidential race heats up.
But Trump knows that American voters rarely prioritize foreign policy issues when voting in presidential elections, and Republican arguments that American tax dollars should be spent at home rather than in Ukraine or Gaza are likely to be a recurring theme in 2024.
Joe Biden had a good week last week. Trump will hope this was an isolated incident.
Source: I News
I am Michael Melvin, an experienced news writer with a passion for uncovering stories and bringing them to the public. I have been working in the news industry for over five years now, and my work has been published on multiple websites. As an author at 24 News Reporters, I cover world section of current events stories that are both informative and captivating to read.