It’s a truism that politics is often a dirty business.
When I was a boy, dinner table discussions with my paternal grandparents, father and uncles sometimes concerned efforts to bribe members of the St. Paul City Council in a rezoning matter.
My grandfather owned a plot of land near what was then the St. Paul JCC — now the Minnesota JCC’s Capp Center — and needed a zoning change to construct some four-unit apartment buildings. Through a lawyer, cash greased the palms of local elected officials; however, the council never approved the rezoning.
That was an early lesson for me in how politics worked. Politicians were corrupt, and to get things done, one had to play the game.
In any case, the talk around our dinner table engendered a lifelong fascination with politics.
Fast forward some 60-plus years and our nation is saddled with the most corrupt presidential administration in its history.
PBS reported in July that President Trump’s various businesses “generated more than $2 billion in income in 2025, his first year back in the White House. That is more than triple his reported income from the year before. The biggest gains came from the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures.”
The various crypto scams netted Trump $1.4 billion last year, as per press reports.
And he’s just getting started.
Trump biographer Michael Wolff, who had a full-access pass to the Trump White House in the first term, has said that the president’s goal is to amass $20 billion before leaving his post in 2029.
In my editorial in the October issue of the Jewish World, I focused on the Jewish grifters in Trump’s orbit, including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has been traveling abroad as a “peace envoy” for the U.S. government, while pursuing lucrative business deals for himself.
I didn’t mention Kushner’s machinations in Albania, where the Trump princeling seeks to advance a luxury resort development. The government of Prime Minister Edi Rama now faces a popular revolt, including street battles between protesters and police, sparked by the fast-tracking of the Kushner project. The Guardian newspaper in London reports that in Tirana “ministerial buildings, banks and businesses have been set ablaze, attacked and looted.”
The revolt is referred to as the “Flamingo Revolution” — the Kushner resort is sited in an environmental preserve that is a nesting area for flamingos.
Governmental and private corruption has been a key theme in the recent election cycle in Minnesota. The GOP candidates, and their dark money backers, have ridden the Feeding Our Future scandal, exploiting the fleecing of federally funded programs to provide meals for vulnerable children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both Lisa Demuth and Michele Tafoya, Republican candidates for governor and U.S. Senate, respectively, have vilified local Somalis for the fraud scandal, and for recent gun violence allegedly perpetrated by young Somali gang members.
(I have noticed that gun and gang violence is a problem of great public concern when it occurs in Edina and Eden Prairie. Over recent summers when the windows in our house are open, we hear gunfire from Powderhorn Park and the nearby Phillips neighborhood; but that hasn’t occasioned a comparable level of discussion from government officials in Minnesota.)
Continuing the theme of politicians vilifying the Somalis, a TV commercial attacking Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a DFL office holder, also brings up the recent indictment of 18-year-old Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud for allegedly plotting a terrorist attack on the Mall of America (see the JTA story on Page 5 of this issue).
Mohamud was contacted two years ago, when he was 16, by an FBI informant. According to an FBI agent’s affidavit in the case, Mohamud expressed a desire to fight for ISIS in Somalia, then later communicated via an internet app to a confidential informant that he wanted to attack the Mall of America “because its owned by jewish [sic] so if i kill even 30 people noone would go there anymore. I want to harm the jew just like the brothers in australia bondi beach harmed the jews.”
The latter reference is to the deadly shooting at Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 14, 2025, in which two shooters opened fire on a Hanuka party, killing 15 people and wounding 40 others.
The Edmonton, Alberta-based Triple Five Group, a real estate and entertainment firm controlled by the Ghermezian family, Canadian Jews from Iran, owns the Mall of America.
I’m skeptical about the federal case against Mohamud, which sounds like numerous FBI ploys that have skittered on the edge of entrapment. I’ve written about similar cases over recent years that involved FBI informants leading knuckleheads down the path of an ostensible terrorist outrage.
I won a 2010 Rockower Prize, from the American Jewish Press Association, for “excellence in editorial writing” for my Jewish World editorial titled “Manufacturing crimes.” The article focused on the case of the Newburgh Four, a group of wannabe terrorists from Newburgh, a town an hour north of New York City. The miscreants were in cahoots with an FBI informant who provided them with fake C-4 plastic explosives and a dummy Stinger surface-to-air missile, which purportedly were to be used in attacks on synagogues and civil aviation.
The defendants were eventually convicted and sentenced to prison; it’s extraordinarily difficult to mount an effective entrapment defense in court.
However, in 2023, a federal judge in Manhattan granted compassionate release for three of the Newburgh Four convicts. “Judge Colleen McMahon’s decision helped rectify the injustice of the decades-long prison sentences in a case where, as noted by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, an FBI informant, not the defendants, ‘inspired the crime, provoked it, planned it, financed it, equipped it, and furnished the time and targets.’ But the FBI rules that allowed this conduct remain in place and must be reformed,” wrote Melanie Geller, in an article posted on the website of the Brennan Center for Justice.
In any case, the Mohamud indictment, which has not been brought to trial, has provided fodder for GOP politicians eager to disparage the Somali American community in Minnesota. The GOP and its candidates for statewide and federal offices should be ashamed of this bigoted and racist behavior, which has engendered fear in the Somali community.
The mudslinging by Republicans in myriad TV commercials is of a piece with what the Minnesota party has become over recent election cycles. Most people likely have forgotten that delegates at the Minnesota Republican Convention, on May 30, in Duluth, participated in a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis cop convicted for the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Perhaps, there will be a change in the political orientation of this country, a retreat from the corrupt and incompetent policies of the Trump 2.0 regime.
As Jews, we should focus on the threats from Christian nationalists that seek to impose their benighted ideology on everyone, and from the power of the tech billionaires behind an AI juggernaut that some experts say could destroy humanity. And we face two more years of misrule by an increasingly unhinged president and his gaggle of sycophants.
The problems are daunting, but we should remember that we’re all in this together. Hopefully, we can put our heads together and find solutions to the long-running problems besetting our society.
The editors and staff of the Jewish World wish all our readers a very happy Hanuka.
Mordecai Specktor / editor [at] ajwnews [dot] com
(American Jewish World, November 2026)
