Trump slams US Democrat policy at latest rally, linking weakness to recent Hezbollah attack

Harrisburg, PA – Nearly three weeks after the assassination attempt that could have taken his life, Republican presidential contender Donald Trump was back in Pennsylvania, holding a mass rally in Harrisburg last night.

Trump told his supporters that the US was no longer respected and that the globe was headed to a third world war, which he proclaimed he would prevent. “I will restore peace through strength,” he declared.

He applied this to America’s treatment of Israel.

“A week ago, the prime minister of our closest Middle Eastern ally, Israel, came to address Congress,” Trump said. “Instead of sending a clear signal that the United States will never abandon an ally – a very important one – Kamala [Harris] chose to politicize the moment... making a show of refusing to attend.”

Harris, the expected Democratic presidential nominee, expressed her unwavering support for Israel’s security in a news conference she held after she met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on July 25.

“We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent,” she stated, pushing for a deal that she said was on the table and “would lead to a permanent end to the hostilities.”

'Courageous decisions despite the great pressure at home and abroad'

Hours before the July 31 Trump rally, Netanyahu addressed the Israeli nation, likely hinting at his meeting with Harris. “For months, there has been no week in which they have not told us – at home and abroad – to end the war,” he said.

“If we gave in to this pressure – we would not have eliminated senior Hamas leaders and thousands of terrorists... We achieved all of our achievements in recent months because we did not give in and made courageous decisions despite the great pressure at home and abroad.”

A contrast seems to emerge between Harris’s approach to bringing peace through a deal with Hamas, and Trump’s approach to bringing such peace “through strength.”

This was enough for Trump to declare last week in the presence of Netanyahu that “any Jewish person that votes for Kamala, or a Democrat, should immediately have their head examined.”

In last night’s Harrisburg rally, Trump focused on one such Jew: Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer.

Schumer, who used to refer to himself as “shomer Israel,” a guardian of Israel, infuriated Israelis on the Left and Right alike when he insinuated in a March 14 Senate floor speech that the Jewish state was a “pariah opposed by the rest of the world,” and that Israeli Jews who were against the idea of a Palestinian state were “bigots.”

“Chuck Schumer has become a Palestinian,” Trump proclaimed in the rally, adding, “he’s become a proud member of Hamas.”

Trump seems to tie such a change in attitudes in the Democratic Party with the erosion of the power of the Israel lobby: “Fifteen years ago, Israel had the strongest and most powerful lobby in this country. Now it’s almost the opposite.”

He then placed the Majdal Shams massacre committed by Hezbollah in the context of the US’s treatment of Israel and of Netanyahu, which Trump said had left the US last week with great embarrassment.

“The enemies, when they saw that all these people abandon Israel... they took note, and I don’t think it’s accidental that just four days after Harris and Biden repudiated our Israeli allies, Iran’s top terrorist group, Hezbollah, fired an Iranian missile, [killing] 12 innocent children at a soccer field in Northern Israel.”

Trump tied this attack to the American weakness that he described earlier: “The terrorists did it because they assumed that they could get away with it because the United States is weak, ineffective, and no longer respected. We are no longer respected.”

Gol Kalev is the author of Judaism 3.0: Judaism's Transformation to Zionism (Judaism-Zionism.com), for his geopolitical articles: EuropeAndJerusalem.com