Obama Shows Trump And The GOP How A Real President Behaves At Shimon Peres Memorial

Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:16 pm

As the actual President was giving remarks at the memorial service for former Israeli President Shimon Peres at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, Israel, Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, was attacking his former Miss Universe Alicia Mochado’s past.

Here’s how Donald Trump spent his early Friday morning:

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As my colleague Hrafnkell Haraldsson explained this morning, Donald Trump and the Right have grossly exaggerated Alicia Mochado’s “past” in order to try to smear her with the sort of things that they virulently defend Trump’s wife Melania for having done. That’s called a lack of integrity and a lack of values.

There is no shameful “past” and Trump’s own wife has posed nude so much the pictures are everywhere, but that doesn’t stop Trump from trying to publicly shame Alicia Machado’s sexuality.

So while President Obama was saying important things like:

Shimon once said, “The message of the Jewish people to mankind is that faith and moral vision can triumph over all adversity.” For Shimon, that moral vision was rooted in an honest reckoning of the world as it is… But he was still a teenager when his grandfather was burned alive by the Nazis in the town where Shimon was born. The synagogue in which he prayed became an inferno. The railroad tracks that had carried him toward the Promised Land also delivered so many of his people to death camps.

And so from an early age, Shimon bore witness to the cruelty that human beings could inflict on each other, the ways that one group of people could dehumanize another; the particular madness of anti-Semitism, which has run like a stain through history. That understanding of man’s ever-present sinfulness would steel him against hardship and make him vigilant against threats to Jewry around the world.

Donald Trump was trying to slut-shame the woman he already body-shamed.

This is how Donald Trump operates, at the lowest level and with no integrity.

I have always defended Melania Trump from attacks on her sexuality – even from the left, and so for me to defend Alicia Mochado from the same is not a partisan knee-jerk defense. It’s basic humanity. If women are to be treated as equals they must not dehumanized via their sexuality.

Donald Trump spent his morning abusing his power to try to slut-shame a woman from the megaphone of his position, so that the entire world now thinks she has some shameful past, while President Obama was discussing how “the cruelty human beings could inflict on each other, the ways that one group of people could dehumanize another.”

Of note, Donald Trump’s bullying of Hillary Clinton during the first presidential debate did him no favor with women voters, he actually lost support from women while Hillary Clinton gained it, according to an NBC News poll.

Donald Trump dehumanizes anyone who crosses him. He abuses his power – money and position – to pick on people who have little to no recourse against his attacks. Real leaders like Shimon Peres and President Obama understand the terrifying danger in dehumanizing others.

Donald Trump is not worthy of taking President Obama’s place in the White House. No matter how low he’s been treated – including by Donald Trump himself, who remains proud of his racist birther attacks on this President, Obama has continued to take the high road.

President Obama is a real leader, Donald Trump is a wanna-be, abusive low-life who belongs in the gutter from which he came. Republicans should be ashamed for standing by this man.

Sarah Jones

Listen to Sarah on the PoliticusUSA Pod on The Daily newsletter podcast here.

Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.

Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.

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