TEL AVIV – For the second time in three days, a senior aide to Blue and White chief Benny Gantz – this time his main campaign strategist Joel Benenson – was discovered to have made incendiary comments on social media against President Donald Trump, including calling him “deranged,” “bigot” and “narcissist” and drawing comparisons with Hitler.
Benenson, who was a strategist for both successful Obama presidential campaigns as well as Hillary Clinton’s failed bid against Trump, joined Gantz’s team last year.
In response to a July tweet, Benenson echoed remarks made by Anti-Defamation League Jonathan Greenblatt who accused Trump of using Israel as a cover up for his “blatant racism.”
Earlier this week, Breitbart News reported that Ronen Tzur, Gantz’s senior advisor who accompanied the Blue and White leader to Washington Monday, had also tweeted dozens of inflammatory posts against Trump, including calling him a “psychopath” and “Donald Adolf Trump.”
In response to an October 2018 tweet that claimed Trump was “paraphrasing Hitler” in his speeches, Benenson posted: “It was Hitler’s speeches. … It’s also where he would have learned Hitler’s demonizing term for the press: ‘lugenpresse.’ Trump’s translation is ‘Fake News.’”
A month earlier, Benenson called Trump a bigot and railed against Republicans who remained silent, calling them “political cowards” and “co-conspirators.”
In July 2018, Benenson said that Russian President Vladimir Putin is Trump’s “puppet master,” and that the American president is trying to “bullshit the world.”
Tzur, too, had charged Trump of colluding with the Russians, tweeting in May 2017, “The most surprising thing about Trump is only one thing was leaked to the Russians until now.”
A tweet dated December 23, 2017, reads: “It seems to me the best course of action is to offer Trump and Kim Jong Un a compromise: Russian roulette with two bullets. Whatever happens, happens.”
Keeping with the Russia theme, Tzur tweeted on December 11, 2016: “It seems the United States President Putin appointed Trump to be Secretary of State.”
In an article on the Benenson tweets, the JNS.org news wire wrote, “The tweets raise questions about the political advice Gantz is receiving regarding Trump’s recently released ‘Peace to Prosperity.'”
Last week, Breitbart News reported that Gantz had unveiled a new slogan for his Blue and White party bearing a striking resemblance to former president Barack Obama’s “Forward” campaign for his 2012 reelection, during which Benenson served as his strategist.
Benenson made headlines in Israel in 2016 when WikiLeaks released emails in which Benenson advised Clinton not to mention Israel at public events. Senior campaign staffers said she should only express support for Israel “when she’s with donors.”
Radio star Mark Levin said the tweets by Benenson and Tzur proved what a “monumental disaster” it would be for Israel if Gantz was elected as prime minister in the March 2 elections.
“Benny Gantz hires staff that compare our president to Hitler. This is the second top aide. What a monumental disaster if the Israeli people install Gantz as prime minister,” he tweeted.
In a separate tweet, Levin added that he couldn’t imagine Gantz having “anything close” to the relationship Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had with Trump.