Heading into the 2024 presidential election, in which incumbent President Joe Biden and Donald Trump are expected to face each other again, there is a clear contrast between the respective major parties’ leading contenders for the nation’s highest office.
After recent terror attacks in Israel, where many hundreds (more than 1,300 overall) were killed, Trump in a speech in Florida actually praised some of the terror groups and their allies that are ideologically opposite Israel in the Middle East. He wasn’t morally endorsing their aims, but he characterized the groups as strategically “smart” — which is also an absurd assertion, considering the basic fact that the terrorism in any reasonable estimation has brought nothing but more bloodshed. Should this observation really be that difficult for someone trying to become U.S. president (again)?
Meanwhile, Biden committed the United States in an interview with “60 Minutes” to working to rescue the U.S. citizens taken hostage by the terror group Hamas during their recent attacks. U.S. citizens are also understood to have been among those killed in the ongoing violence — which the leading Republican for president evidently thinks was “smart.” “We have to communicate to the world this is critical,” Biden said in the interview. “This is not even human behavior. It’s pure barbarism. And we’re going to do everything in our power to get them home if we can find them.”
Trump acknowledged in his initial remarks calling the terrorists “smart” that he’d previously received criticism for similar language. The former president has applied a similar description to actions by Russian President Vladimir Putin against Ukraine, where in reality all parties involved have been significantly set back, whether through the devastating impacts on the targeted country or the military failures amid Putin’s authoritarian obsessions. This time, Trump tied his comments about adversaries being ostensibly “smart” to criticism of current Israeli leadership, which he claimed had been for a time involved in prep for the U.S. strike that killed Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani. It’s unclear what truth underlined Trump’s claims here.
