Trump’s dressing down of Zelensky is not just bad for Israel. It’s bad for the Jews.

The Trump doctrine of “know your place”.

I watched a U.S. president tense up in the Oval Office as a foreign leader lectured him about history.

I’m not talking about the debacle Friday involving President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The event I witnessed up close was almost 14 years ago, when I was part of the pool ushered into the Oval Office to witness what was supposed to be mutual declarations of support between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu – the fodder typical of these encounters.

It did not go down that way. Netanyahu, patronizing, presumptuous and prescriptive, lectured Obama. Folks close to Obama have told me that was a turning point in the souring of the relationship.

I stood a few feet from Obama and watched his jaw clench and his hand grip his armrest.

The encounters in 2011 and on Friday made headlines for bringing out into the open tensions normatively kept behind closed doors. But they were very different.

The leader of a small and vulnerable nation publicly humiliating the leader of a major power is monumentally bad politics, but rattles just one box, the bilateral relationship.

A major power humiliating a vulnerable ally live on TV does not portend good things for other U.S. allies, including Israel.

It is world changing..

Vance’s attack on Zelensky was not simply an expression of an isolationist foreign policy, it was nativist in a way that should unsettle Jews whatever their Israel politics. The motto is “America First,” but what Vance and Trump are peddling is a vision of an America that is white and Christian above all.

The presence and preeminence of Vance, who has for years been hostile to Ukraine, in the Oval Office, could only serve to deeply unsettle Zelensky.

Trump and Vance placed Zelensky and Vladimir Putin on the same plane, describing mutual hostilities instead of unalloyed Russian aggression and pretending that it was Zelensky and President Joe Biden who had abjured diplomacy.

That’s what got Zelensky to lose his cool (another distinction: Netanyahu came prepared to disrupt diplomatic norms, Zelensky was dragged into it.) “What kind of diplomacy, J.D., you are speaking about?” Zelensky asked after listing a litany of the diplomatic agreements breached by Putin. “What do you mean?”

What Vance meant was that Zelensky must accept a hierarchy of truth: At one point, Vance slid within a sentence from “disagreements” (without explaining what he disagreed with) to Trump’s immutable rightness:

“Accept that there are disagreements, and let’s go litigate those disagreements rather than trying to fight it out in the American media when you’re wrong. We know that you’re wrong.”

In Trump’s America, there are no disagreements, there is only Trump and wrong. (White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt does not describe the Associated Press’ hewing to “Gulf of Mexico” nomenclature as a matter of preference or even a disagreement but as a “lie.”)

Trump was especially infuriated by Zelensky’s prediction that abandoning Ukraine (and Europe) would have an unpleasant knock-on effect for Americans. “No, no, you’ve done a lot of talking,” Trump said.

Dominance is part of the point – Vance’s insistence that Zelensky thank Trump and the United States, when Zelensky has repeatedly done so, including at the outset of the Oval Office meeting, is classic “say Uncle” bullying. So was the Trump stooge who mocked Zelensky’s attire. But dominance is not the only point.

Trump’s silencing of Zelensky and Vance’s specious reprimands about thanks is redolent of caste systems: One caste has the right to speak, the other must plead for it.

This is not just the case in international relations. It is why Trump has made English an “official language” (with dubious legal basis.) It is why Vance can decry “elites” for condescending to the white middle class while fabricating vicious lies about Black Haitians.

Foreign and domestic policy have never been discrete, nowhere really, but especially not in America. Alliances are based on shared values, strategic interests, but also on sentiment and on personal ties. Jewish American advocacy for Israel is not a unicorn. Irish Americans, Black Americans (against Apartheid and for humanitarian assistance), Greek Americans, Arab Americans and for that matter Ukrainian and Russian Americans, all advocate for motherlands.

The attachment of ethnic minorities feel for their brethren overseas is one factor of many in determining policies. But demanding its total excision is not “America First,” it is “know your place.”

Trump administration officials (including God help me Jewish ones) in the wake of the meeting with Zelensky sought to preempt any criticism of Trump and Vance as disloyalty to America.

Vance has cast “America First” as consistent with the Roman Catholic theological precept of “Ordo Amoris”. “First you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens” and then the rest of the world, he told Fox News Channel last month.

But family, neighbors and community – and country for that matter – are not mutually exclusive silos, which you’d think would be evident to a man who ran for the Senate as a son of Ohio but who wants to be buried in Kentucky.

The impulse to protect one’s loved ones however far away they may be is acute in our age of immediacy, when their anguish is just a call, a text, a doomscroll away. It is also, at least for Jews, an impulse as ancient as pidyon shvuim, the redemption of hostages. Doña Gracia Nasi probably never met many of the Jewish captives she ransomed in the 16th century. What mattered is that, like she had once been, they were in mortal peril and she had the means to save them.

It’s not an impulse J.D. Vance gets, or appears to get. By his own account posted just three days hectoring Zelensky, Vance recalled hectoring a Ukrainian American constituent who criticized him for abandoning Ukraine. The constituent, no doubt at wit’s end watching his native land burn, “offended” him, Vance said, just for suggesting he had more than one country.

Vance has made pleasant noises about Israel and Trump has aligned himself (for now) with Netanyahu’s wildest dreams. But believing the Jewish state gets an “America First” cutout is like believing your new best friend is a Nigerian prince.

Vance and Trump are still cozy with Tucker Carlson, who does not hesitate to include Israel among the countries he says suck at America’s teat, and who also platforms antisemites. Trump longs for a deal with the Iranian regime. Don’t expect it to differ, if he gets there, from the deal Obama brokered and that Trump abandoned. As we’ve seen with Mexico, Trump tends to repackage his predecessors’ diplomacy as his own, new and improved.

Russia is an ally of Iran and may have assisted the regime in launching missile attacks against Israel last year. Pro-Israel outfits that tend to otherwise be supportive of Trump’s foreign policy are already sounding the alarm that he might bring Russia into the Iran talks and withhold critical support of Israel’s plans to cripple Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Vance in December threatened with government scrutiny the employer of a woman who questioned Elon Musk’s support for AfD, the far right German party that also flirts with Putin. The employer, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, happens to have as its preeminent preoccupation the threat Iran poses to Israel.

Netanyahu needs U.S. backing to contain Iran in much the same way Zelensky needs it to contain Russia. Expect him to make a similar pleading soon. This time, going by last Friday, he may be on the wrong side of a dressing down.