Flattery, Disraeli once said, is best laid on with a trowel. In the Israeli parliament, they laid it on with a JCB. So voluminous and so cloyingly thick was the weight of adulation heaped on President Trump that he almost appeared to have become preserved in it. After two solid hours of relentless sycophancy it appeared possible that his head might be cocked to one side like that forever more, his face stuck in that trademark close-lipped grin for the rest of time.
In the end, we needn’t have worried. The president recovered in good time to deliver a further hour of what can only be described as Gettysburg praise, which is to say praise of himself, by himself and for himself, which most certainly has not been banished from the earth.
Never, in the field of human conflict has so much credit been given by so few to even fewer. On a day when Israeli hostages were finally returned to their families after two years of unimaginable horror, it is a remarkable achievement that the greatest public outpourings of mutual love and affection happened between two old men, Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu, at the podium of the Knesset.
It was a historic day, certainly, but a carefully choreographed one, too. While Israeli hostages were being driven out of Gaza by the Red Cross and back home, Team Trump arrived one by one in the balconies of the Knesset to rounds of standing ovations. Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio, all received the same treatment. For reasons only he can know, the Knesset speaker, Amir Ohana, saw fit to deliver almost an hour-long encomium to his distinguished guest, before Netanyahu rose to do exactly the same, almost verbatim.
“You are a colossus who will be enshrined in history,” Ohana told him. “You are a giant of Jewish history,” he said. “One for whom we must look back two and a half millennia into the mists of time to find a parallel, in Cyrus the Great.” Trump looked sceptical. Had it really been that long since Achy Breaky Heart? It was, in fact, Cyrus II of Persia who liberated the Jewish people when he came in like a wrecking ball against the Babylonians in 539BC.
Ohana, and after him Netanyahu, stuck to a finely honed script. There were at least six mentions of Trump and his obvious worthiness for the Nobel peace prize. The Trump peace-o-meter is now officially up to eight conflicts solved. When I saw him barely three weeks ago at Chequers he was only on six, and one of them was between “Aberbaijan” and Albania. Should the president continue at this terrifying rate, there is a very real risk that in three months’ time there will simply be no more conflicts left for him to end, and so the only viable way to continue his campaign for the Nobel peace prize will be through threatening to bomb Norway.
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Somewhat predictably, things only went off-script when Trump began to speak. Netanyahu has been using the war against Hamas to delay for two long years both an election he is unlikely to win, and a trial for corruption, over gifts of champagne and cigars from an Israeli businessman.
Such things may not now be delayed for much longer. The main point of this event was a final, very public and much-needed popularity boost. Down in the front row, Netanyahu smiled and nodded while Trump heaped praise upon him. But he also has a refreshing knack, among politicians, of saying what he actually thinks, which doesn’t always help.
“You’ll be remembered far more for this than if you’d kept going for three or four more years of kill, kill, kill,” he told him. Netanyahu’s eyes looked down at the floor. Contrary to popular belief, and countless horrific hours of television footage, “kill, kill, kill” was never quite the publicly acknowledged strategy.
He also, probably, wasn’t meant to call the leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, “a very nice man,” and then turn to Netanyahu and say: “Now you can be a little bit nicer, Bibi, because you’re not at war any more.”
There were, in fact, many things he wasn’t supposed to say. He definitely wasn’t meant to turn to the softly spoken Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, seated to his left, and say of Netanyahu: “Why don’t you give him a pardon? Cigars and champagne, who the hell cares about that?”
At this, both Herzog and Netanyahu made simultaneous eye contact with their respective footwear. Asking, in public, for what would be a highly corrupt pardon in a corruption case, may not be what you call “helping”.
While the three of them spoke, for a very long time, most of the rest of the most powerful people in the world, including Sir Keir Starmer, were rattling around at a peace summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, waiting for Trump to arrive.
When he finally made it, Trump lined up all the world leaders behind him at the lectern. “Where’s the United Kingdom, where’s the UK?” said Trump, and summoned Starmer forward. For a second, it looked as if the prime minister was intending to actually say some words into the microphone. There was a chance that a very small amount of credit might have to be shared around and that wouldn’t do. Trump cut across him, and Starmer took four short steps back to where he had come from, looking about as happy as Gareth Southgate on his way back from the penalty spot in 1996.
When Ronald Reagan was in the Oval Office, he famously kept a little sign on the desk that said, “There is no limit to what a man can do if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.” The world has changed now, and in the most bizarre of ways, arguably, for the better. There really would suddenly appear to be no limit to what humanity can achieve, so long as we accept that only one man, Donald J Trump, can ever get the credit.