Welcome to Trumpland

After almost two and a half months, Inauguration Day is here. Donald Trump dominates the tabloids as he gets sworn in as president of the United States (or United State, depending on whom you ask in the Hebrew press). The Donald pushes aside IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot’s cancer surgery and Sgt. Elor Azaria’s possible three to five years in prison for manslaughter.

Only Haaretz keeps it local by not putting the president-elect all over its main coverage, perhaps in an effort to ignore the commencement of his four years in office. Its lead story, labeled “Only in Israel,” keeps in the realm of the absurd by reporting that the head of the Finance Ministry’s illegal construction oversight unit lives in an illegally constructed home in a West Bank outpost.

Yedioth Ahronoth takes a hiatus from its angst over the police questioning of its publisher to brace itself for the imminent inauguration of President-elect Trump. The paper is so eager to get its message across to the president himself, or at least his people in Washington, that its Page 2 op-ed about the transition from the Obama years to the Trump years is run in both Hebrew and English (though the latter leaves a bit to be desired).

“Mr. Obama is deserving our thanks for his efforts. And today, while leaving the white house [sic] for good, he will be accompanied by the applause of eight and a half million people whose families were able to come out of hell and establish an independent country,” veteran writer Eitan Haber says. “The Jewish people has a long memory and we will forever remember our benefactor, the man who has showered so much on us.”

On the other side of the equation, Haber says that he believes “that Donald Trump ought to find the right balance between his genuine affection to Israel [sic] and the need to lead American the best way he can. Therefore, one of the first challenges of [sic] the 45th president of the United State [sic] is to restore some of the trust so many Israelis have lost in America in the last several years.”

Possibly the most objectionable part is that Haber attributes the Priestly Blessing, possibly one of the oldest verses in the Hebrew Bible, to the Siddur (prayer book), not the Book of Numbers.

Israel Hayom perpetuates its fawning coverage of all things Trump with a two-page spread by gushing fanboy Boaz Bismuth entitled “American legend: President Trump.” In his breathless coverage of the lead-up to the inauguration, Bismuth says that “many American citizens arrived in Washington, some of them even for the first time (!) to be a part of history.” What’s with the exclamation point, Bismuth? Does it surprise you that there are Americans who have never been to Washington (do you realize how far it is from, say, Alaska?), or that people are flocking to Washington for an inauguration? Perhaps he forgot that 1.8 million came to Obama’s first swearing-in just eight years ago.

The paper reinforces the new president’s bona fides by running a picture Bismuth took of Trump with billionaire and Israel Hayom funder Sheldon Adelson and his wife.

While Israel Hayom wants its readers to keep eyes on Trump and pay no attention to the sentencing of IDF Sgt. Elor Azaria, Haaretz makes as little a deal out of the presidential inauguration as it could get away with on its front page. If you break out a magnifying lens you can just make out its coverage in the bottom right corner, directing readers to Page 10 and 11. Instead, the paper keeps its sights trained on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the ongoing investigation into his alleged malfeasance.

The paper’s big scoop of the day is that Netanyahu supposedly used code words to ask his confidant for expensive cigars and champagne.

The only place Haaretz doesn’t shy away from Trump is its political cartoons, where it shows Netanyahu riding the Trump elephant past his political allies, and a (presumably) Israeli family sitting around the TV watching Trump’s inauguration with the words “high alert.” What either of them means is unclear, but that could explain why Haaretz has that seven-percent market share.

Haaretz also reports that Israeli intelligence officials warned Netanyahu against pushing for the cancelation of the Iranian nuclear agreement. They say Iran has by and large met its commitments in the year and a half since the deal was struck, and that “there’s a concern that canceling the deal would cause a great rift on the Iranian issue between the US and other world powers signatory [to the deal], foremost Russia and China.”

For those who venture past the adulation and trepidation of Trump, the newspapers report that Eisenkot successfully underwent surgery for prostate cancer, which Israel Hayom notes is the most common type of the disease among Israeli men.