Borrowed Power |
Trump, Netanyahu, and the Fantasy of Exemption
Donald Trump’s pressure on Isaac Herzog to pardon Benjamin Netanyahu is not merely crude. It is revealing. The claim is simple enough for a child to understand, which is perhaps why so many adults in politics find it irresistible: the leader is too important to be judged while war is underway. He must be spared inconvenience. He must be protected from interruption. He must be allowed to concentrate on history. Trump has pushed that line repeatedly, while Herzog has insisted that Israel is a sovereign state governed by law, not by outside pressure. Reporting this week also indicates that the relevant Justice Ministry unit does not recommend a pardon at this stage, and Trump has now escalated from pressure to insult, calling Herzog “weak and pathetic” and “full of crap.”
This is not strength. It is political infantilism dressed up as urgency.
War is not a curtain behind which leaders get to hide their legal problems. It is the opposite. War is the moment when fantasy sends the bill. Its real cost is not commentary, not polling, not the bruised feelings of powerful men. Its real cost is death. Bodies torn apart. Families waiting for calls that should never come. Civilians displaced. Cities damaged. Fear made ordinary. To say that such a moment exempts the leader from judgment is not seriousness. It is moral laziness in executive form. The dead do not testify on behalf of exemption. They testify against every political lie that made them more disposable.
The deeper problem is not Trump alone, or Netanyahu alone. It is the exhausted fantasy that political order can still be carried by one man. Modern states no longer function through the clean heroics of civics textbooks. They run through bureaucracies, intelligence systems, coalition extortion, legal procedures, military chains of command, economic dependencies, media ecologies, foreign pressure, and technological mediation. Yet frightened publics are still offered a simpler fairy tale: one man at the center, carrying destiny on his shoulders. The machinery is far too large for him, but the machinery still needs his face as a mask.
That is why so much of today’s leadership feels juvenile. Not merely ruthless. Ruthlessness can at least be cold. This is pettier than that. Too many leaders now behave like boys in a schoolyard, desperate to stand close to the loudest bully so that borrowed noise may pass for stature. Marco Rubio, standing beside Viktor Orbán, said US-Hungarian relations were entering a “golden era” and told him, “President Trump is deeply committed to your success, because your success is our success.” That is not the language of serious statecraft. It is the language of political dependency trying to sound grand.
Giorgia Meloni offers a more elegant version of the same disorder. Trump publicly praised her willingness to help in the US-Israel war with Iran. Then, facing the reality of what such alignment actually meant, she turned and denounced the conflict as part of a dangerous trend of interventions “outside the scope of international law.” There is a certain comedy in this sequence: first the applause line, then the late discovery that flattery from Trump is not a strategic doctrine. It is only an invoice that arrives before the embarrassment does.
Pedro Sánchez, by contrast, looks almost strange simply because he has chosen the lost art of adult refusal. He rejected US use of the bases at Rota and Morón for attacks on Iran, called the war unjust, and drew threats of trade retaliation from Trump. One need not agree with Sánchez on everything to see the point. Better a government that can say no under pressure than one that confuses proximity to Trump with geopolitical maturity.
And this is where Europe enters the picture more broadly. The continent does not merely suffer from weak leaders. It suffers from leaders who increasingly no longer know how to appear serious without leaning on someone else’s performance of power. Some seek Trump’s blessing. Some fear his displeasure. Some criticize him only after first trying to be photographed as his useful friends. The result is a political class that wants the glamour of sovereignty without the discipline of responsibility.
This is why the word leadership itself now deserves suspicion. In too many cases it no longer means the capacity to carry burden under limits. It means the theatrical management of fear. It means converting public anxiety into permission. It means treating law as a nuisance, procedure as sabotage, and emergency as a permanent solvent of restraint. The office is no longer experienced as a constitutional burden but as an ego prosthesis. Losing power becomes indistinguishable from personal humiliation. Hence the frantic appetite for pardons, immunities, exceptional measures, and hysterical claims that the nation cannot survive if one particular man is made to answer ordinary questions.
To think seriously, and still think Jewishly, is to refuse this degradation. Not because Jews are required to agree on policy. They never did. But because the Jewish archive, at its sharpest, does not teach the worship of rulers. It teaches suspicion toward power when power begins to speak in the language of innocence. It teaches distrust of kings who confuse necessity with holiness. It teaches that danger does not abolish limits. It reveals why limits were needed.
Trump’s demand that Herzog rescue Netanyahu from the burden of judgment should therefore be read for what it is. Not an act of friendship. Not a defense of Israel. Not even a coherent theory of wartime governance. It is the fantasy that the leader stands so close to the fate of the people that law must step aside and watch. That fantasy has damaged more than one republic. It always arrives draped in urgency. It always claims that this one man is too necessary to be touched. And it always expects the public to mistake panic for greatness.
But borrowed power is still borrowed. It does not become wisdom because it is loud. It does not become legitimacy because it is frightened of courts. And it does not become statesmanship because war makes everyone else afraid to speak clearly.
War is not an alibi for the leader. It is the harshest possible test of whether a political order still remembers the difference between burden and vanity.
Too many now fail that test with the emotional discipline of children.
Some will say that with Iran posing an existential threat, pragmatism leaves Israel no choice but unconditional alignment with Trump. But that is exactly when the distinction between alliance and vassalage matters most. And vassalage has never been a form of strength.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig