Preparing for a Trump presidency

While Donald Trump is the leading candidate for the GOP nomination, he is not the leading candidate to be the next president of the United States. As polls clearly show, Trump is trailing in every match up against the two Democratic candidates. Hillary Clinton beats him in the polls. Bernie Sanders beats him in the polls.

And yet, in this surprising election season, a Trump victory in November is something that only few people would discount as an impossibility. No one believed he could win the GOP nomination – and he has a very good chance of doing so. So betting against him in the general race, and seeing him win, would make one a fool-me-twice type of observer, whether that observer is an American expert or an Israeli policy maker preparing his country for 2017.

I wrote an article for the New York Times a few days ago about Trump and Israel, an article in which I counted the many reasons why Israel is wary of a Trump presidency.

Israel depends on an America that asserts itself abroad. Israel needs bipartisan support. It needs stable, predictable American foreign policy. It desires candidates who sing Israel’s praises as often and as loudly as they can. Mr. Trump, who looks poised to capture the Republican Party’s nomination, offers Israel none of those. Mr. Netanyahu has every reason to be concerned and disappointed by what the American political system has produced this election cycle.

The article made some waves, and prompted a lot of responses. The more I heard, especially from Israeli policy makers, the more I could pin down the crux of Israel’s problem with Trump. It is already in the article:

And then, of course, there is Mr. Trump’s unpredictability… Mr. Trump… is vague about his plans, if he has any. Sometimes he promises to destroy the Islamic State, other times he wants to leave the task to Russia. He criticizes the Iran deal, but unlike some other Republican candidates, doesn’t say he will “rip it up” if he is elected.

In a meeting I had a few days ago with a high-ranking Israeli official, he offered me a sharper version of the argument I was making. In the world today, he said, it is more important to distinguish between the policies of leaders by a predictable\unpredictable measurement than by positiveegative measurement. Of course, there are some exceptions (Iran would be one), but generally speaking one could make the argument that predictable is positive and unpredictable is negative. And this is especially true for a Middle East that seems to have gotten out of its mind in recent years, and in which reliability and consistency are becoming the rarest commodity.

Trump is anything but predictable. This is, probably, both due to a certain character and temperament, but also due to the fact that most of the issues he will be dealing with as President are not issues with which he is familiar. He did not quite think his position through before uttering his preposterous statement on abortion, and he does not quite think his positions through before making statements about the Middle East.

This makes it almost impossible for a country like Israel – or Britain, or Argentina – to prepare for a Trump presidency. If Hillary Clinton becomes President, we pretty much know what to expect. And as I predicted in my NYT article, it is probably not going to be easy or pleasant for the current Israeli government, but also not out-of-the-ballpark shocking. With Trump – who knows? It can be a heaven, or a hell. He can become heavily invested in making Israel-related policies, or delegate all of it to someone else. And if it’s someone else – it can be anyone. Maybe a friend from the world of business, maybe an expert on foreign policy that currently advises one of Trump’s rivals; or maybe someone who is sitting on the fence but who, when called to save the country from the president it chose to elect, will feel obligated to serve in a Trump administration.

Imagine – a Trump administration. Preparing for this is like preparing for the scariest roller coaster. Standing in line with a beating heart, taking a deep breath, pretending to be brave, hoping it will be more thrilling than nasty.