President Donald Trump couldn’t help himself.
Speaking with the unabashed Israel apologist Mark Levin on Tuesday, Trump, who is coming off arguably one of the strongest weeks of his second administration, threw away any goodwill earned from his cross-country peace summits by lavishly praising Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “He’s a war hero,” Trump said of Netanyahu, a man who has been charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. “I guess I am too,” Trump added with a chuckle.
Levin, who has used his platform to openly advocate for the genocide of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, loved every second of Trump’s sparkling praise for Netanyahu. Levin, who this month accused Netanyahu critics of attempting to “incite Kristallnachts all over this country,” chuckled along with the president. Two genocidal peas in a pod.
The question of Gaza is the haunting specter of Trump’s second term in the Oval Office. No matter what comes of the proposed stalemate along the Ukrainian border, Trump will have to answer for his derelict and thuggish approach to the desperate, degenerating situation in Gaza where men, women, and children are being systematically starved and bombed every day by an Israeli war machine backed by the power of Trump’s American empire. Despite repeated attempts by pro-Israel outlets to question the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, even Trump admitted in July that the people of Gaza are experiencing “real starvation.” Trump’s celebratory praise of Netanyahu, who received multiple red-carpet rollouts from the Trump administration in the first eight months of 2025, is indicative of a president who has loudly promised peace but time and time again supported Netanyahu, a man who ranks among the worst of today’s war criminals.
According to the Gaza Healthy Ministry, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been ruthlessly snuffed out by the Israeli war machine since Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing more than 1,200 Israelis. And new numbers from a classified Israeli military intelligence database that were corroborated by the Guardian suggest that 83 percent of those killed in the Gaza Strip these last two years were civilians. Tens of thousands of innocents have died in the past two years, and 100,000 more are estimated to have been injured in the same time frame.
These numbers are staggering. To accuse Netanyahu of war crimes is not the same as absolving Hamas of its dreadful role in the killing fields, an accusation that American media members such as Levin have recklessly assigned to anyone who questions the ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians in Gaza.
During his primetime speech at the Christians United for Israel conference in July, Levin framed the genocide in Gaza as “God’s war” and accused European skeptics of Israel’s wrath as being the same “stupid” people who gave rise to Adolf Hitler. Miriam Adelson, who contributed more than $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign, was spotted cheering in the crowd. So, for those who have closely followed the Trump arc this past decade, especially with regard to Israel, the president’s open-mouthed tongue-bathing of Netanyahu shouldn’t come as a surprise. But it does help shed light on an open-ended question that the president pondered during an appearance earlier that same day on Fox and Friends—the question of Heaven.
“I want to try to get to heaven if possible,” Trump said, only hours before calling Netanyahu a war hero.
“I’m hearing that I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole,” he added in jest. It was the sort of comment that has made Trump such a generational enigma. There appeared to be a striking humility in his admission that he was at the “bottom of the totem pole.” But was it humility or simply a stark admission of what Trump, the man, must question of himself when he peers into his gaudy, gold-leafed mirrors at the White House? How can a man, any man, who supports the continued starvation and systematic destruction of poor, helpless people who were unlucky enough to be born into an ancient blood feud thread the eye of the needle?
Furthermore, how can a man who has promised to end wars but has consistently signed off on bombing campaigns realistically believe he is a true peacemaker? As then-Rep. Ron Paul warned throughout his numerous presidential campaigns, “They attack us because we’ve been over there.” Paul’s righteous message ironically helped fuel Trump’s ascension; Trump smartly adopted, if in speech only, Paul’s belief that our indiscriminate war campaigns in the Middle East have sowed more war the planet over.
The promise of heaven and the idea of divine intervention have infused Trump’s rhetoric ever since the president survived a would-be assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania in July of 2024. Now, Trump often suggests he was saved that fateful day so he can lead the country through a time of deep secularism; never mind the fact that the assassin’s bullet struck down firefighter Corey Comperatore, a loving husband and father of two, who was killed protecting his family only feet behind Trump at the speech.
“I felt then and I believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason,” Trump said during his inauguration in January. “I was saved by God to Make America Great Again.” It’s worth noting that in this scenario, the same God who saved Trump permitted Comperatore to be killed for reasons which aren’t exactly clear. Evidence of Trump’s turn toward the evangelical wing of the Republican Party was further exhibited later that month when he appointed Paula White, a millionaire televangelist who speaks in tongues, to become the senior adviser for Trump’s newly created “White House Faith Office” at the start of Trump’s second term.
When Trump attacked three Iranian nuclear facilities in June, he credited the Lord. “I want to just thank everybody, and in particular, God,” Trump said in a televised address following the bombings. “I want to just say, ‘We love you God’ and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel and God bless America.”
A month before American bombs rained down on another Middle Eastern enclave thousands of miles from our shores, the Catholic Church selected its next Pope. They chose an American. Amid all the war, and it’s been decades of unrelenting war now, the cardinals chose a pope who in his words and deeds has prioritized the message and salvation of peace. Leo XIV has been vocal in his opposition to the brutal violence and starvation in Gaza that dominates today’s headlines without criticizing Trump directly.
Nor is the pope alone. On Thursday, Matteo Cardinal Zuppi, the head of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, spent seven hours reading the names of all 12,211 children killed in Gaza during Israel’s multi-year destruction campaign. “They ask us all to commit ourselves to finding or pursuing the path to peace with greater intelligence and passion, starting with a ceasefire and offering the conditions for doing so, from the release of hostages to not taking an entire people hostage,” stated Zuppi.
It’s not only the Catholic Church that is witnessing a surge in visibility as the ethnic cleansing continues apace. The antiwar wing of the Republican Party is also suddenly in the ascendency as its members watch Israel ramp up its offensive in the Gaza Strip. Some of Trump’s most vocal and ardent supporters have found their own brave voices and courageously broken from the president, despite real concerns it may cost them future campaign money and alienation in key parts of the MAGA base. After an Israeli shell struck the only Catholic church in Gaza this July, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) pulled the ripcord. In a series of tweets and interviews, Greene, who has long questioned the Israeli influence on America’s foreign policy, dropped any pretense that she would continue to support a state that has its hooks deep in the halls of our American Congress.
“Israel is the only country I know of that has some sort of incredible influence and control over nearly every single one of my colleagues,” Greene told Megyn Kelly. That “incredible influence” was on full display when a group of bipartisan Congressional members visited Netanyahu in Israel in early August. The meeting was hastily organized after House Speaker Mike Johnson quickly recessed the House in July amid calls for the Republicans to release Department of Justice files on Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex criminal and onetime friend of Trump.
As if America’s unending financial and military entanglement in the Middle East and Eastern Europe isn’t enough, the Trump administration is also eyeing new incursions in Mexico and Venezuela to slow the cartels and the onslaught of drugs and human trafficking through our southern border. And though we do witness the substantial risks of the cartels’ influence on the health and wellbeing of our American public, and though there is a responsible argument for curbing the chaos that emanates from regions either partially or fully attached to our great land mass, any military strike against our southern neighbors will only further ensnare our nation’s children in the sort of forever wars that bleed our people and its Treasury. It’s the exact opposite of what Trump the candidate promised Americans and especially his war-weary voters— an end to the relentless bloodshed and misery that has made us into new imperialists.
In 1958, during the cold, relentless New York City winter, the legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans penned a beautiful, pastoral improvisation he would later title “Peace Piece.” It’s a strange tune that instantly recalls the lushness of Satie and the bitterness of Chopin. On its surface, “Peace Piece” is a lovely tune but underneath there lives a somber, deeply unnerving energy. An extreme dissonance in the sweet song suggests what peace might fully encompass—a peculiar, widening fault between unfocused lines of harmony and violence and an earnest appreciation for the deeper reality: None of us are perfect. Our meager attempts at peace within our souls and beyond our doorsteps requires monotonous, everyday dedication, despite our animalistic tendency to strike out against one another in rage.
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I believe that God knows that we are not perfect, that we are born to sin; I believe that we may be forgiven if our heart is dutifully molded, through loss and love and time, to become pure and true. I believe that is what heaven is, the measure of progress on our lifelong, winding paths to personal purity.
So it’s difficult to believe that the true Lord of all would gaze kindly upon two men who sheepishly chuckle over the war-hungry Netanyahu. None of us can know who enters heaven, or whether God will reward tyrants, men who traded and bargained in the currency of innocent lives amid strip-mall aesthetics and callous appeals to “life and liberty”? When the day comes, as everyone’s day does, only Trump will know his eternal fate.
Hope it’s not too hot.
