Jonathan Sacks and Jewish Music - The Monday Morning Memo

Listen to the podcast with Rabbi Sacks or read the transcript at Tim.blog

“

You want a perfect example of a post-literate moment? Ponder the UN speech by President Trump this week. Even written down, it was ‘the weave’ — a series of unconnected rants and digressions, baseless assertions and unseemly insults, a stream of addled and angry consciousness with no real relationship to coherence, or reason, or persuasion.

Imagine the head of a small country standing up at the UN and saying:

“I’m really good at predicting things, you know?… I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything.”

We’d all be embarrassed, no? It would go viral as a cringe clip. But since this absurd, meandering thug is the US president, we let it go.

Or consider this gem:

“In the United States we have, still, radicalized environmentalists, and they want the factories to stop. Everything should stop. No more cows. ‘We don’t want cows anymore.’ I guess they want to kill all the cows.”

If that august body was aghast, it was because few had ever witnessed, outside a comedy movie, the head of state of a country speak like that before: no dignity, no coherence, no real argument as such, just loopy madlibs and inappropriate outbursts.

The America whose values many across the world once aspired to is now, in its public posture, coarse, irrational, emotional, petty. It’s a global joke. It’s up there with a Sacha Baron Cohen performance.

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- Andrew Sullivan, Sept. 26, 2026

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