Omar Baddar

Trump can simultaneously be authentic and a liar

Hello and welcome to What’s Left?, a weekly newsletter delivering interesting interviews with people on the left.

This week, we’re mostly discussing the war in Gaza. Many of my guests have touched on it so far, with Brits frequently expressing anger at our centre-left government’s response. Today, I’m talking to a Palestinian American about the reactions of the Biden and Trump administrations. It won’t surprise you to hear that there’s plenty of criticism of Trump. It may however surprise you to hear one (razor-thin) silver lining to this new administration. But overall: yeah, mostly criticism of Trump.

This is a condensed write-up of our recorded conversation. You can watch and listen to the full version here.

Omar Baddar is a Palestinian American Middle East analyst and a member of the National Policy Council of the DC-based Arab American Institute. He previously served as Communications Director at the Institute for Middle East Understanding, Deputy Director at the Arab American Institute, and Executive Director at the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee of Massachusetts. He wrote his Master's thesis on US policy towards Israel and Palestine. His media appearances include CNN, MSNBC, BBC, Al-Jazeera, Democracy Now, and many other outlets, and his writings have appeared in Salon, Newsweek, Huffpost, the Daily Beast, and Jadaliyya, among other platforms. Omar can be found on Twitter/X, Bluesky, Instagram and TikTok.

Hi Omar. We’re talking in the evening in the UK on Valentine's Day, so I just need you to know that you’re my date tonight.

I am honoured.

So if there was a version of the political spectrum with zero being the centre, -100 means you're a fascist and +100 as radically left as you could get, where would you put yourself?

I will boringly say 75. Decidedly left of centre but you know, context is everything. Here in DC, it's such a mainstream establishment environment that I’m seen as a crazy lefty to most of the people I come across. But then I lived in Boston where there were a lot of super lefty activists with radical politics and to them, I was boringly mainstream and centrist. So it’s really hard to tell and depends on where you are.

Interesting. I didn't know that about Boston, though I knew that about DC for sure. So have you always been left-wing?

You know, I was apolitical growing up. I grew up in the Middle East in multiple countries: originally Palestinian, then in Kuwait, Jordan, Yemen, Oman and the UAE.

Wow, the whole gamut.

When you're Palestinian, you get bounced around quite a bit. But those environments were fairly repressive and authoritarian. You have a lot of personal freedom as long as you’re not critical of official government policy and so most people learn to just stay away from that entirely.

I only moved to the US as a teenager and then when I was in college, it was the second Palestinian intifada and then 9-11 and the invasion of Iraq, and that sort of quickly thrust me into politics. Very quickly I learned that I'm a lefty just through that engagement.

When we started talking politics when I was in college, it was a completely alien environment for me to step into. We can actually say what we think here and try to influence policy and there was so much wrong with American foreign policy. So that’s how I got into it.

Those are three huge historical events that I could see might thrust you into the political game. Also, it’s interesting that your experience was being able to have these conversations more easily in America. When I moved to America from the UK, I was told to never bring up Israel/Palestine. To have less conversation essentially. I was surprised because it was something my friends and I talked about at home freely and openly. But my American friend just said, ‘No, you cannot say what you think here.’

It's still a taboo in Washington. It's still something that people would rather not talk about.

Still?

There's still the reflex that if you're going to say anything, you're supposed to just express a pro-Israel general view and move on. But the scale of atrocities that we're witnessing at this point against Palestinians is so huge that you just can't keep a lid on it anymore.

It's untenable that you can't challenge it or talk about it at all when you have so much American money being spent on a foreign government committing what many major human rights organizations at this point are describing as a genocidal campaign.

Have you noticed any difference now compared to at the start of the war? From my perspective, it looks like as the atrocities have gotten worse and worse and worse and worse and worse, slowly people are easing off their pro-Israel stances slightly.

I think that's fair. October 7th was legitimately a traumatic event.

Oh, of course.

And then you add on top of that the lies and the Israeli government propaganda. There was all this rhetoric about beheading babies and opening up pregnant women — a level of sadism that made that event so shocking to the conscience that you basically had to say whatever Israel did in response was justified somehow. They made October 7 seem like an exceptional evil that nobody else in the universe is capable of in order to justify what was going to follow, which is obviously a deliberate attempt at destroying Palestinian society in Gaza entirely.

And with Trump, we're finally getting a more honest read on what the intentions are.

Rather listen to or watch this interview? Check out the longer video and audio versions here!

So how have you felt in reaction to Trump's recent comments? That was a huge shift, right?

It was a shift in rhetoric. There is something deeply frustrating about the fact that we pretend in America that Biden and Harris were humanitarians who were really concerned about Palestinians, and now this monster has come along.

Actually, Trump can only say that Gaza is unlivable because the Biden-Harris administration facilitated the destruction of Gaza with endless American weapons and endless American protection, intervening at the UN to block ceasefire resolutions at the Security Council. The groundwork was laid by the previous administration.

The Democrats say things like, ‘Oh, too many innocent people have been killed and we need to put an end to this.’ That’s rhetoric that’s meant to put a palatable face on a really ugly and horrific and dark policy. The difference now is Trump does not care about coming across as palatable. It's a level of bluntness about a horrific situation. But I think the horror of American policy on this goes back for many, many years before Donald Trump came along.

This might be a really inappropriate question — and so just say if that’s the case — but is there any relief in Trump being clear about his intentions after Biden and Harris saying one thing while doing the opposite?

That's a really inappropriate question, so I'm not going to answer that one.

I'm totally joking.

Oh my god. My heart just stopped.

Yes, there is something uniquely infuriating about the hypocrisy. About people funding the slaughter of thousands of Palestinian children while saying, ‘Oh, I feel so terrible, this is so bad, I would love to do something about it.’

It is a bit of a relief in some way to just have somebody who says what they mean and means what they say with regard to this policy. Though I don't want to put a face of honesty on Trump. He's one of the biggest liars on the planet.

Ha yes.

But him not caring about perceptions and wanting to seem more humanitarian than he is — that is a bit of a relief.

Now, the double-edged sword is when you introduce these ideas out in the open, you are creating room for racism. There were always racist people in America — that's undeniable — but when you spout racism from the podium, suddenly you empower other people with racist ideas to be a little bit more aggressive with it. And I think that’s a risk here. He’s giving voice to the ideas that exist only in darkness. Suddenly we're having a policy debate about whether Palestinians can be ethnically cleansed or not.

When you spout racism from the podium, suddenly you empower other people with racist ideas to be a little bit more aggressive with it.

So we’ve briefly touched on Biden and Harris, but what about the party now? If the bigwig Dems stumbled on our little interview, what would your message to them at this point in time?

Honestly, I would have to suppress a lot of expletives.

No need to suppress, this is a safe space for expletives.

They genuinely have been incredibly fucking stupid, especially in the lead-up to this election. It's it's been infuriating. Running a centrist campaign, shying away from progressives, endorsing the genocide unreservedly and refusing to speak out against it, not allowing a Palestinian to speak at the DNC, and more broadly, just stepping away from working-class Americans… Biden has done some decent stuff on domestic policy in support of unions and labour and so on. But Harris just completely shrunk away from all of that and ran a pretentious joy campaign. People in this country are struggling and our foreign policy is a disaster. To just put on this phony joy and to speak in a way that is utterly inauthentic which nobody else connects with seemed like a recipe for disaster.

I was one of only a few people calling it early. I was saying, ‘Even though people are optimistic or whatever else, I have a very, very bad feeling about this election and I think Trump is going to win.’

Oh, wow.

And then when it materialized, rather than look in the mirror and examine what they’d done wrong, it was immediately decided that they had not moved from the left far enough. That they were somehow too radical and too accommodating of the left. But that was absolutely not the campaign that they ran. So there doesn’t seem to be an effort at an honest self-reflection.

I guess I would say to them, ‘Please wake up, develop a backbone develop and some principles and try to do better. Touch some grass. Get out of the DC environment in which you just listen to the same consultant class that tells you to repeat the same stupid talking points that you keep repeating that don't connect with anyone. Try to have a meaningful relationship with people.’

I really think that that's one of the major differences between Trump and Harris in their campaigns is that even though Trump is, again, just an incredible liar and a scumbag of a human being through and through, he was able to speak in a way that people felt was authentic. He can simultaneously be authentic and a liar.

Trump doesn't care about hyper-rehearsed DC speak and consultant talking points. He just talks the way he talks and that resonates with people. And I think that’s something that they really have to work on and do differently in the Democratic party.

They should get out of DC and go to Boston for a bit.

Exactly.

I’m impressed that you called the election. I truly thought Harris was going to win, but I am always wrong and I kept remembering that I was always wrong which did worried me.

Well, that's a mind fuck! Do you not just then try to think the opposite?

It quickly gets too complicated. The last thing I said before bed on election night was, ‘I really believe she's going to take all swing states! But remember: I am always wrong.’ And you know what, I was right in that I was wrong.

Ha.

Ok Omar, do you think you would be able to summarize your views in a sentence?

Honestly, ‘Do no harm’ probably would be the way I'd summarize them. Then maybe the follow-up is ‘Stand up to bullies’. Basically, make sure that you’re not oppressing anyone, but we live in a world in which oppression does exist and when you see that happen, you should not be a bystander.

I love that. Both the passivity of not harming and the action of calling it out when you see it. Do you have any secret conservative ideas?

I don't think that I have any specific conservative ideas but I do have criticisms of the left.

Fab. Let’s hear them.

I find that we primarily speak to ourselves and don't try to get out of our bubbles and that explains why so many people were confident that Trump was not going to win.

And then also on the left, primarily online, we create these puritanical zones in which if you deviate from this view, you're not part of us.

It's quite cliquey, isn't it? A little bit high school.

Extremely so.

Is there any action that you could recommend for readers and people viewing this?

Get out of your bubble and expose yourself to a wider spectrum of views and the reality that's unfolding. Get a better sense of what this country and what this world is like.

And what's some reading that you'd recommend? I would personally love something about the history of Palestine.

There's so much. There's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Israeli historian Ilan Pappé is a good one for what unfolded in 1948. Anything by Edward Said is incredible.

Then there's a new book that I just wrote the forward to actually by Phyllis Bennis called Understanding Palestine and Israel. She's a remarkable analyst and it's an introduction to the basics of this issue and American involvement.

Hopefully there’ll be no criticism of Britain in any of these books because we come off really well in the story.

Oh, never. That's a country in the world who’ve never done anything.

No notes. But thank you so much for talking to me, Omar. I learned so much and am really thinking of your family and friends still in Palestine and Israel.

Thank you, Amy, appreciate it. And thank you for being my podcast Valentine!*

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*Omar called me his “podcast Valentine” in an email after our actual interview. I wanted to include it because I thought it was funny and sweet!

What do you think guys? Do you agree that Trump is authentic and a liar? And what do you think of Omar’s view that Harris ran a “pretentious joy campaign?”

I recently started the What’s Left? chat — open to free and paid subscribers — so please hop on and let us all know what you think there!

And if you’re into comedy as well as politics, you might enjoy my satirical podcast. In FeMANism, my friend and fellow comedian Samantha Martin and I play two truly awful men mansplaining feminism from a shed in Chippenham. It’s exactly as silly as it sounds. We release new episodes including video every Monday, so check us out if you’re not a massive misogynist! 💕