Oct. 27 and Nov. 3, 2026, are shaping up to be two of the most important dates in the history of two of the most important democracies — Israel and America. Those countries will be holding hugely consequential elections on those dates, just a week apart. Why so consequential? Because what is on the ballot in both places is not just the political futures of President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is the future of democracy in both places.
Let me start with Israel’s election, which comes first. Netanyahu is in a coalition with Jewish supremacists whom a former Israeli Mossad chief once described as worse than the Ku Klux Klan. If they are re-elected, they are very likely to complete their project of undermining both Israel’s independent attorney general and its Supreme Court. Annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and ethnically cleansing Palestinians from both places will come next. And Israel as a democracy will be gone.
Once that happens, Israel will become a pariah, à la apartheid South Africa. The Jewish state has already lost the support of much of the Democratic Party in America, of many young Republicans and of pretty much every liberal party in Europe. Israeli academics and singers will be increasingly banned from appearances across the globe. Thousands of Israel’s scientists, mathematicians, A.I. software designers, engineers, fighter pilots, nuclear physicists — its best and brightest — will gradually emigrate. A recent study found that 1,370 doctors left Israel for at least 12 months over the past three years, a number that exceeds the number of doctors at many of Israel’s major hospitals.
For several years now Moshe Ya’alon, a thoughtful, right-of-center former defense minister under Netanyahu, has been expressing alarm about the direction of the Israeli government. As my Times colleagues in Israel reported, Ya’alon has taken his warnings to a remarkable new level, likening the ideology of extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank to that of Nazi Germany in local news reports.
“What is Jewish supremacy?” Mr. Ya’alon recently asked on the Israeli news site Ynet. “Eighty years after the Holocaust, ‘Mein Kampf’ in reverse. The master race is us.”
This is a clanging alarm bell. Israeli society is still too traumatized by the war in Gaza to jump directly into new peace negotiations with the Palestinians. But I have no doubt that if the opposition to Netanyahu — now most prominently led by the former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces Gadi Eisenkot, a very decent man with much in common with Yitzhak Rabin — is able to triumph on Oct. 27, at least the shameful pogrom that Netanyahu has enabled Jewish settlers to perpetrate in the West Bank will be halted and Trump will have an Israeli partner ready to make a good faith effort to implement his peace plan for Gaza. Trump would be a complete fool to endorse Netanyahu, who has done everything he can to frustrate Trump’s Gaza initiative.
To hold on to his coalition partners, stay in power and drag out his trial on multiple corruption charges, Netanyahu has been ready to sell out any core Israeli value and frustrate any U.S. peace plan. Most recently, he worked hard to exempt thousands of ultra-Orthodox youths from Army service and gave millions of shekels to their schools, which teach no lessons for modern life or work skills — and at a time when the Israeli Army finds itself short on soldiers.
Dan Ben-David, an Israeli economist who heads the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research, explained the demographic basis for the threat to Israeli democracy. Fertility among most Israeli population groups is about two children per woman, but among Netanyahu’s ultra-Orthodox Haredi allies it is about seven children per woman, Ben-David said. These parents “intentionally deprive their children — primarily the boys — of a basic education enabling future economic independence and an understanding of the underlying foundations of modern democratic principles,” he said.
A quarter of Israel’s first graders are ultra-Orthodox, Ben-David told me, and their share of the population is doubling every 25 years. “The past four years, the worst in Israel’s history,” he said, “have provided us a nightmarish promo of the full feature movie that awaits our nation if we don’t change course while there is still time to do so.”
While I care about elections in Israel, I care much more about them in my own country. Trump is the most un-American president in my lifetime. No president has done more, and continues to do more, to unravel the post-World War II institutions and alliances that were built and sustained by his predecessors.
We are talking about NATO, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, NAFTA, our intimate relationships with Canada and Mexico and our military alliances with South Korea and Japan — to name but a few. These relationships and institutions together produced global and American prosperity and great power peace for generations.
Yet Trump and his enablers are systematically unraveling them in the name of “America first,” but with the result being America alone and, eventually, America in decline.
Particularly disgusting to me, though, is Trump’s coddling of the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who has not only been trying to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign state but has also sabotaged both NATO and the European Union, two vital pillars of Western security and prosperity. Recently, Putin proudly boasted of helping Iran in its war with the U.S. in the Persian Gulf, actively supplying Tehran with “necessary” equipment and essential goods. Putin keeps spitting on America, and Trump keeps telling Americans, “Hey, folks, it’s just raining.”
Trump has never framed the war in Ukraine honestly. We are witnessing Putin’s attempt to destroy a vital European democracy. Why? What is up with Trump’s unshakable bromance with Putin? The truth has always been hiding in plain sight: Trump, unlike any of his predecessors, does not consider democracy to be a core value. He prefers the company of the likes of Putin and Kim Jong Un.
It is easy to see why. According to a recent report by my Times colleague Eric Lipton, “Never before in American history has there been anything like Donald J. Trump, a president who in his first year back in office has collected about $1.4 billion in new revenues from cryptocurrency businesses that directly benefited from his actions as president,” according to a financial disclosure report released on June 30.
If Trump’s party prevails in November, his multifront effort to undermine America’s democratic institutions and the rule of law would almost surely go into a whole new gear.
“Right now, Trump is unpopular and therefore weak,” Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that fights for election integrity, remarked to me. “The assumption is that his project has failed politically — that he’s yesterday’s news.” But if Republicans win, “that changes the incentive structure for everyone,” Bassin said, from Republican lawmakers to Silicon Valley bros. They all will be even more supine, enabling Trump to be even more unrestrained.
“That to me is the gravest danger,” Bassin said.
In other words, with a midterm success, Trump will feel more emboldened and empowered than ever — at a time when he is clearly declining both mentally and physically; at a time when we are in the middle of possibly the greatest technological transformation in human history (the birth of self-improving, artificially intelligent agents and robots); at a time when climate change, which he denies, is obviously making our weather hotter and more unstable; at a time when he will have alienated practically every friend America has in the world, even Canada; at a time when he is stuck in a war with Iran that is draining our military resources and is led by a clown, Pete Hegseth, who may have fired or blocked promotions of more American generals than he has killed Iranian ones; at a time when China is taking over the world’s electric vehicle market while the president is trying to grab Venezuela’s oil.
A year ago, I heard one of our former presidents privately observe that we can survive Trump’s second term as long as our institutions remain intact. Well, unfortunately, they have not. Who would argue today that the Justice Department, which has been turned into a personal legal weapon of the president, is intact, that the Department of Health and Human Services is intact, that the Pentagon is intact, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is intact or that the Federal Communications Commission, which is now run by a Trump-appointed hack who acts as combined government censor and minister of propaganda, is intact?
Repairing these institutions, restoring them to some independence, to be run by real experts, will be harder than people think. Ditto in Israel, where Netanyahu has appointed hacks and cronies deep into the Israeli bureaucracy and even national security institutions.
Every American and every Israeli needs to think about these questions when entering the voting booth. No foreign enemy is powerful enough to destroy either of these two democracies — not Iran, not Russia, not anybody. Only forces from within can do that. Only self-destruction can do that. And have no doubt: Self-destruction is on the ballot in both countries.
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