(JTA) — At first glance, a message that President Donald Trump retweeted on Thursday morning reads like a mini anti-John Bolton screed.
Trump of course is furious with Bolton, his former national security adviser, for writing a book to be published next week that claims Trump was ignorant on foreign policy matters and, among other things, requested reelection help from Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Here’s the full tweet:
John Bolton, a notoriously mendacious enemy of all living beings on the planet, is discovering what every other great Republican hope of the Resistance has: liberals will eagerly lap up any piece of hysterical Cold War propaganda if they think it can be leveraged against Trump.
However, the tweet was written by Max Blumenthal, a notoriously anti-Zionist left-wing commentator and son of Sidney Blumenthal, a former aide to President Bill Clinton and an adviser to Hillary Clinton.
The younger Blumenthal is a strident critic of Israel and of American foreign policy. He has earned notoriety for praising the Assad regime in Syria and minimizing or ignoring atrocities committed by Assad.
In 2013, Blumenthal published the book “Goliath,” which harshly (and, many critics said, unfairly) criticized Israel for its military operations in Gaza and for its treatment of African asylum seekers. In the book, Blumenthal used terms familiar from the Holocaust to describe Israeli actions.
So Trump wasn’t exactly retweeting a friend. But it will be interesting to see if the conservative pro-Israel establishment, which at one time adored Bolton for his fierce hawkish support of the Jewish state, splits with Trump in this saga.
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