Donald Trump rattled off jokes Thursday at a gathering of influential Jewish Republicans, using his blunt sense of humor to woo the packed auditorium. But when the GOP hopeful addressed top-line issues for these voters, the crowd’s laughter quickly waned.
Before diving into the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the nuclear deal or Iranian officials’ belligerent rhetoric toward Israel, Trump warmed the crowd up with a series of borderline offensive quips.
“I’m a negotiator like you folks, we’re negotiators,” he said, drawing laughs.
Trump continued to build on the stereotype that Jews are talented negotiators. “This room negotiates a lot. This room perhaps more than any room I’ve ever spoken to.”
“He woke me because I was falling asleep prior to that,” one of the attendees told the Washington Examiner. She and her husband agreed, “Trump was very funny.”
“He’s witty [and] uplifting. It was an entertaining thirty minutes,” she added.
But when the conversation shifted to how to achieve peace in the Middle East, the audience wasn’t nearly as entertained by Trump’s proposals as they were with his jokes.
The outspoken billionaire gave a long-winded answer when asked to address comments he made during a recent interview with the Associated Press. In the AP article, published hours before Trump spoke at the Republican Jewish Coalition forum, he suggested that achieving peace between Palestine and the Jewish state relies on whether the Israelis are “willing to sacrifice certain things.”
“They may not be, and I understand that, and I’m OK with that. But then you’re just not going to have a deal,” he told the AP.
“I said, people are going to have to make sacrifices one way or the other,” Trump, who leads the Washington Examiner‘s presidential power rankings, said Thursday.
“I believe that I can put both sides together but it will take six months,” he said, speaking of his ability to reach a peace accord in the region should he be elected president.
Trump continued, “I will know very quickly whether or not I will be able to put that deal together. If I could do that, it would make me so happy because there’s so much violence, so much death, and it’s been going on for hundreds of years.”
While Trump touted his negotiating abilities, members of the crowd noticed his remarks were deficient of detail. The business mogul attempted to sell his vagueness as central to his overall negotiation strategy.
“I don’t like to, as a dealmaker, give away a lot of cards by talking about how I deal with this event,” he said — a tactic that didn’t settle well with some attendees.
“He gave no answer,” one woman said.
“‘The Art of Evasion,’ that’s going to be his next book,” her husband chimed in.
Andrew Friedman, a Los Angeles-based attorney and president of a local synagogue, said there’s no need for Trump to “go and make specific commitments” to bolster his support among Jewish voters.
“Right now other candidates are going to kiss everybody’s rear end, but Trump was honest. That doesn’t bother me and I believe he would be great for Israel,” Friedman told the Examiner.
Trump’s refusal to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s “undivided capital” didn’t upset Friedman either, though a majority of the auditorium booed the candidate.
“You know what I want to do — I want to wait until I meet with Bibi. … I just want to,” the GOP front-runner said, declining to give a definitive answer.
Trump introduced his speech Thursday with a joke about his daughter’s ties to the Jewish community: “You just like me because my daughter’s Jewish.”
“Mishpacha. He’s saying, ‘I’m one of you,'” Friedman explained, citing a Hebrew word that means “family.”
“I’m not alarmed by anything Trump said today, but I don’t think he has the temperament to be president,” he added.
