“Tucker has lost his way,” Trump told ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl in an interview. “I knew that a long time ago, and he’s not MAGA. MAGA is saving our country. MAGA is making our country great again. MAGA is America First, and Tucker is none of those things. And Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that.”
I’m finding it harder and harder to criticize the president,
even knowing all the ‘bad stuff’ about him accumulated since he first took
office.
But as I have said in the past in his defense, the president
does have a conscience. It isn’t always about ego. Or getting maximum support
even it includes bigots and antisemites. Especially when it comes to Orthodox
Jews, for whom it seems he has the highest regard. (Which is not the case for non-Orthodox
Jews, most of whom despise him about which the feeling is mutual.)
What triggered this presidential response was yet another
far-out conspiracy theory from Tucker Carlson about Chabad:
“You may know people who give money to Chabad or run Chabad—super nice people, engaged in all kinds of charitable activities,” Carlson told his followers about the global Hasidic sect in a video he posted Thursday. “But what is Chabad exactly?”
Carlson went on to claim, “Chabad has been pushing in a pretty subtle way, unless you look carefully, for the reconstruction of the Third Temple”—the fabled structure that, according to ancient Jewish teachings, heralds the arrival of the messiah. Building the temple, he says later in the video, “is considered so esoteric and weird and crypto-historical and religious and kind of culty. What’s Chabad? No one ever mentions it.”
He accused Chabad of sitting at the center of what he said was an effort to wage a holy war in the Middle East aimed at destroying the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque—Muslim holy sites built on the remnants of the ancient Jewish Temple, known as the Temple Mount—in order to clear the way for its reconstruction.
