Trump and his people know exactly what they are doing, and they are doing it the only way it can be done in the post-Obama environment. Pravda, USA won't let you know that.

Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer The writer is adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools, Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, congregational rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California, and has held prominent leadership roles in several national rabbinic and other Jewish organizations. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and served for most of the past decade on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America. His writings have appeared in The Weekly Standard, National Review, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem Post, American Thinker, Frontpage Magazine, and Israel National News. Other writings are collected at www.rabbidov.com . More from the author ► The writer is adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools, Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, congregational rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California, and has held prominent leadership roles in several national rabbinic and other Jewish organizations. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and served for most of the past decade on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America. His writings have appeared in The Weekly Standard, National Review, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem Post, American Thinker, Frontpage Magazine, and Israel National News. Other writings are collected at www.rabbidov.com .

Rasmussen published a poll yesterday. 56% of Americans support the ban on people entering America from certain countries; 33% oppose it. (This will change somewhat as the New York Times/ Washington Post/ CNN media (collectively, “Pravda USA”) continue to hammer, but it will not change as much as it would have forty years ago, in the Watergate era, when there was no Fox News or talk radio nor an internet of news sources like Israel National News/ Arutz Sheva, National Review, Weekly Standard, American Thinker, Frontpage, American Spectator, and Drudge to provide an alternative perspective.)

Trump’s actions are legal. They will be upheld. The judges who have temporarily restrained his orders primarily are comprised of Obama appointees. The stand-in Attorney-General who refused to enforce his action is an Obama appointee who was brought in and worked for Holder.

Understand that each-and-every thing that Trump has done, does, and will do will be portrayed as ham-handed and tone-deaf. When he was elected, the media reported that he was way-behind in naming a cabinet, reflecting incompetence. When he named his Cabinet in efficient and precise order, he was portrayed as tone-deaf, selecting an EPA head who fights the EPA, an Education Secretary who endorses charter schools, an entrepreneur as Secretary of State, an Energy Secretary who previously has called for closing that Department, and such.

He is depicted as tone-deaf for naming four or so retired generals to oversee the security and defense portfolios, and a few billionaires among his Cabinet. He was portrayed as ham-handed when he took on Carrier over moving its plant to Mexico, Boeing over the cost of the new Air Force One, and another defense contractor over the cost of the F-35. All he can show for that “ham-handedness” is a race among such corporations to build new factories in America and to employ tens of thousands more Americans rather than ship their jobs overseas.

(By the way, has our closest Mideast ally, Israel — itself a pure Western democracy — ever allowed a retired general to be a Defense Minister? Moshe Dayan? Ehud Barak? Ariel Sharon? Perhaps there is something to it.)

Trump’s inauguration speech was depicted as tone-deaf and ham-handed, failing to rise to the inspiration of the Kennedy speech that really was written by someone else, Ted Sorensen, and depicting a dark picture when America really is brimming with light and happiness and joy and glory.

If you get your news from Pravda USA you will have one perspective. They specialize in finding every heart-wrenching story that can be found to augment and season their agenda:

For the immigration ban, they find the uncle from Yemen, four times removed (now to be a fifth time), that a family cannot live without.

For the fight against the death penalty, they find the convicted capital murderer about to be executed though he learned to read when in prison and now writes books about birds.

For the effort to protect the unlimited influx of Illegal Aliens across the Mexican border, they find the illegal alien being deported while leaving behind a wife and kids.

Yet, somehow, when reporting the immigration ban, they never find the story about the family that never will be the same after a person who was radicalized overseas came back to murder their relatives in Orlando or in San Bernardino. When reporting on capital punishment, they never find stories of the victims of a capital murderer’s sadistic murder spree. When reporting on the deportation of Illegals, they never find the Kate Steinles shot to death by an Illegal or killed by a drunk Illegal on the roads.

They specialize in Fake News. That is their hallmark. That is the Made-in-America product they manufacture. They fake the news by choosing whom to elevate from oblivion and to quote as an “expert” and whom not to quote. They create a news story about a character who portrays himself as an “Orthodox rabbi” and who writes a prayer beseeching that his god cause the President of the United States to fail. They do not report that this same exact character has no real synagogue congregation, that no synagogue actually will recite this prayer, that no Orthodox entity has anything to do with the nonsense. They fail to report that mainstream normative synagogues like mine, which could not pray for Obama, now recite a prayer once again for the well-being of the President of the United States and of his Vice President and all his cabinet and officers.

They place one story on page one and another on page 14. They cite “unnamed sources” and mysterious “sources within the Department.” They highlight an outlier opinion handed down by an Obama judge and discount the contrary opinion handed down by a judge named by someone else. They report Fake News, and they create a Fake News reality where Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump because she kept traveling to West to raise money in Hollywood and in Silicon Valley, so she ran up the vote in California, while Trump was busy speaking to voters in less-populated rural areas of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Maine’s second district.

They publish Fake News about supposed reports that Putin will have sordid information to blackmail Trump for the next eight years derived from a business visit when Trump was in Russia and when his aide, Michael Cohen, was in Czechoslovakia. Yet Michael Cohen’s passport evidences that he never went to that country, and Trump could not have done some of the things they suggested because Trump, like the comedian Howie Mandel, is a germaphobe.



As one can gain perspective of a forest by beholding it from outside, one can see how Pravda USA falsifies American news by looking at how they treat Israel.

On election night, Pravda USA reported that a landslide for Hillary was unfolding in Florida with a massive Latino revenge turnout against Trump; in the end, Trump carried Florida and did better with Latinos than did Mitt Romney four years earlier. These media elected Martin Sheen President of the “West Wing” on CBS, and they do not realize that Fake News and Fake Results do not take root in the real world.

As one can gain perspective of a forest by beholding it from outside, one can see how Pravda USA falsifies American news by looking at how they treat Israel. They falsify and misrepresent the realities of life among the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria, where more than half a million Jews live normal everyday lives built on Western values. They falsify reports of “victimized Palestinian” supposedly uprooted from a fig tree and olive tree that ancestors supposedly cultivated for three thousand years in Hevron and East Jerusalem, defying all possible historical reality. They falsify the reality of the protection to the country enforced by The Wall in Judea and Samaria.

They falsely portray a free and democratic moderately conservative Israeli coalition as an extreme right-wing agglomeration of fascists and religious zealots. This what the Pravda USA media are. Everything Israel does is depicted as ham-handed and tone-deaf. Netanyahu speaking to Congress at Boehner’s invitation: ham-handed. Fighting Hamas by bombing Hamas terror installations and rocket launchers that terrorists establish atop residential apartment buildings and in schools and in hospitals: ham-handed. This is Pravda USA, viewed from afar.

For those of us who know Israel, does Israel take in immigrants blithely from those seven countries? Does Israel take in tens of thousands of refugees from Syria? Does Israel have a policy allowing unrestricted immigration from Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and the rest of the seven countries that Obama designated as terror nests? Has Israel built a wall? Indeed, Israel has built two walls, two big and beautiful walls.

The beauty of Trump is that he made promises, he came to get the job done, he is keeping his promises, and nothing is stopping him. As happened with Clarence Thomas, the viciousness of Pravda USA is molding a man with a moderate conservative world view and transmogrifying him rapidly into a stronger conservative for the rest of his life because, as Pravda USA forced Clarence Thomas to turn to Antonin Scalia for comfort and friendship, Pravda USA similarly is forcing Trump’s team to turn to Christian evangelicals and conservatives in the Heritage Foundation for support.

Trump named the first of his Supreme Court names. If — when — the Democrats try obstructing that name, he will use the Harry Reid Initiative, eliminating the filibuster rule exactly as Harry Reid repeatedly excised the filibuster rule from Senate decorum, and getting that nominee through on a majority vote. At least 3-5 Democrat senators will support the nominee, perhaps several more, and that new justice will be approved by at least a 55-45 majority. Trump will do the same repeatedly with the next justice or two or three whom he gets to name, and over the next four years he will methodically undo Obama’s radicalizing disruption of the thirteen federal Appeals Court circuits and the 94 District Courts.

It all will be depicted as ham-handed and tone-deaf. None of it is. Trump and his people know exactly what they are doing, and they are doing it the only way it can be done in the post-Obama environment: ostensibly ham-handed and tone-deaf, but really crazy as a fox and wise as an owl. Obama may have taken steps to remove Andrew Jackson from the currency, but no former President’s portrait could have been more fitting for Trump to have moved into the Oval Office.

Rabbi Dov Fischer, an attorney and adjunct professor of law, is rabbi of an Orthodox congregation in California and holds and has held prominent leadership roles in several national rabbinic and other Jewish organizations.