This was months ago — probably after he declared his candidacy, but back during the period I assumed he wasn’t serious or the party wouldn’t let him get anywhere near shouting distance of the nomination.

I was reading an article about Israel, I can’t remember what but probably something to do with dichotomies (it’s full of them). It included an aside about Benyamin Netanyahu visiting some kind of trade show and waxing rhapsodic about cows. These were no ordinary cows. These were high-tech SmartCows. The finest. Just like everything in Israel. Even the water is electronic. (No quotation marks because I’m paraphrasing from memory what might have been an English translation from Hebrew. But, trust me, it’s a close paraphrase.) And I realized that the voice with which I was reading these statements to myself, in my mind, wasn’t Netanyahu’s sonorous three-quarter Kissinger.

The voice was Donald Trump’s.

At the time, this was merely hilarious: a new angle from which to view the wrong-headed but horrifyingly effective prime minister. But since then Trump has travelled across the USA, peddling crypto-fascism and racking up impressive victories, aided by establishment media which can’t break away from what for them amounts to a circus performing inside a burning building. Then yesterday Trump went to the 2016 Policy Conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. And he won.

AIPAC is an easy audience, of course. Its goals, preferences and terminology are rigorously well-defined and without much subtlety, however opaque in places. The language doesn’t require much study to master, and we all know Trump can give a speech — or at least, as my Grampa Ren would have said, “speechify” which is not the same thing but, for Trump’s purposes, may be better.

The language doesn’t require much study to master, and indeed all the presidential candidates who accepted invitations* to speak made competent use of it. Every one got some applause. But Trump — whose campaign targets for scrutiny as Other have included glances at Jews; who can’t seem to bring himself to put any distance between him and white supremacists who do far more than glance; who had not long before set pundits atwitter with his comparatively nuanced statement of neutrality with regard to Israel and Palestine — Trump brought down the house. He made the other Republicans look like guests. And Democrats, who could have articulated some real contrast in the person of Bernie Sanders, instead were reduced to an echo.

The most baffling candidate scores another baffle. Except that, as with most of his sudden political success, it makes a great deal of sense if you can peel back the labels and assumptions that we rely on to describe our politics but which have aged or may never have fit that well. AIPAC doesn’t have Zionism in its name, or in its mission, but it is an inherently Zionist organization. Zionism is a Jewish nationalism, of which surviving forms are mostly explicitly political; candidate Trump is a political nationalist — both in the sense many US-Americans have of patriotic statism, and in the older and more widespread sense of political devotion to tribe.

Trump’s language the rest of the time isn’t the same as AIPAC’s, but it is complementary to a degree that the other candidates’ aren’t. That’s part of the affinity, but there’s something else. Love it, hate it, both at once or by turns: Trump is very New York. The city. Performatively, mixed in with the German and Irish of his family, with the many cultures of the city, Trump is very Jewish. It’s in his gesture and posture, his word choices and pronunciation. But — and this is critical — his performative Jewishness isn’t attached to any nebbishy, self-efacing shtetl stereotype. It’s attached to the kind of tough, bluff peasant figure some Jews have notoriously despised and envied, and which were poured into some stereotypes of Israelis as “New Jews”.

So Trump doesn’t need a little mustache any more than Netanyahu needs peyoth or a beard — it would just get in the way. But he has the language; he was raised with it. He does not need to breathe fire from the podium, though I’m sure he could. As small a part as AIPAC may play in his further rise, he and it know now that they understand each other. And, any of us who didn’t know that before, we know it too.

*  There are other candidates, from so-called third parties. To my knowledge they were not invited. Sanders, choosing to focus his presence where actual contests were to occur the following day, offered to deliver his remarks by video. This was a courtesy allowed for Netanyahu, but not the senator from Vermont. In retrospect, attending AIPAC in person might have forced more media to pay him more attention yesterday and today. But being willing not to attend at all is in some ways more impressive, to those paying attention, than Trump’s performance.