Tuesday afternoon, Jan. 7, President-elect Donald Trump re-posted to his Truth Social account, without comment, a clip of Columbia University Prof. Jeffrey Sachs ripping into the lies, the “game of narrative,” used by U.S. administrations to get the U.S. into wars in the Middle East. Sachs was speaking on Oct. 22, 2024 before the Cambridge Union. In the clip, Sachs names Barack Obama’s infamous “Operation Timber Sycamore,” the presidential order to the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad—a U.S. intervention carried out, he emphasized, four years before the Russians intervened in Syria (at the Syrian government’s request). “This is not democracy,” Sachs said. Another case he cited: that the phony pretext for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was cooked up by “focus groups” held in the fall of 2002. “They wanted the war all the time, but they had to figure out how to sell it to the American people.”
The clip taken from the X account of “Wall Street Apes” which Trump reposted, had added as its comment: “If the CIA is overthrowing governments overseas, then they 100% do it here in America.”
It was Sachs’s charge that it was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who “obsessively” pushed the U.S. to carry out these wars against Iraq, Syria, and now Iran, that made the headlines in Israel. “‘Deep, Dark Son of a B—h': Trump Shares Anti-Netanyahu Video Online” Ynet News headlined its story, quoting Sachs on the Prime Minister. The Sachs clip, all 2:13 minutes of it, was embedded with Hebrew subtitles added, in its article, which otherwise suggested that “U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump may be reigniting tensions with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after sharing a video on his social media featuring a scathing critique of the Israeli leader by Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who is Jewish.”
Times of Israel focused its story, “Trump Posts Clip of Prof Calling Netanyahu ‘Obsessive’ about Getting U.S. To Fight Iran,” on the Iran issue. Netanyahu stated after Trump’s election victory that the two see “eye-to-eye on the Iranian threat in all its components, and the danger posed by it,” ToI wrote, but “the fact that Trump shared a video that explicitly criticized the Israeli premier for trying to get the U.S. to go to war with Iran brings Netanyahu’s assessment into question.”
Jewish Insider sniped that Trump had reposted a “clip from prof who traffics in conspiracy theories, attacks Netanyahu’s ‘power,’” but had to report that while Trump spokesman Steven Cheung had replied to their query that Trump’s post “is clearly referencing Obama’s failed policies and the corrupt media,” Cheung “did not respond to a request for clarification that Trump was not endorsing Sachs’s condemnation of Netanyahu.”
