How unsurprising is it that former President Donald Trump appeared recently at an event supposedly devoted to opposing antisemitism — and proceeded to deliver a speech dripping with antisemitic innuendo and contempt for American Jews?
Like so much of what Trump says and does, his remarks at the “Combating Antisemitism” affair in Washington, D.C., expressed a bitter grievance. He resents the fact that Jewish voters in the United States remain overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, which means only a minority of them vote for him. He bluntly argued that his support for Israel’s right-wing and bloodstained government somehow entitles him to Jewish votes, even though many Jews are critical of Israeli policy and political leadership.
Hours later, at an event for Israeli Americans, he expanded on the same themes but went much further, seeking to scapegoat the entire Jewish community for the electoral failure he now fears:
“If I don’t win this election, and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens, because at 40%, that means 60% of the people are voting for the enemy ...”
Aside from his noxious description of his political rivals as “the enemy,” Trump’s attempt to blame Jews in advance for a Republican defeat at the polls is both absurd and sinister. Absurd because Jews are a tiny fraction of the electorate, mostly concentrated in states where he has no chance to win anyway. Sinister because the MAGA movement that Trump has spawned is crawling with neo-Nazis, White nationalists and antisemites who are already primed to spread hatred of Jews and other forms of racism.
And he knows it.
Trump’s rise over the past decade has seen the mainstreaming of every extremist ideology on the right — a category that encompasses antisemitism along with racism, homophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia and the violent antagonism toward immigrants that he and his vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance now encourage routinely. As the Republican Party moved sharply rightward under Trump’s leadership, the most vicious hatemongers have sprung up to proclaim their bigotry loudly, while proudly identifying as MAGA.
The latest mortifying episode involves Mark Robinson, the GOP candidate for governor of North Carolina, a pious moralist whose raunchy online persona was suddenly exposed by a CNN investigative team. Much of what Robinson wrote on the “Nude Africa” porn site is too scandalous to be recounted on television, including his sexual encounters with his sister-in-law. What could be reported in full were his viciously bigoted screeds. “I am a Black Nazi,” he wrote, declaring his admiration for Hitler and the genocidal murderer’s autobiography, “Mein Kampf.”
But here’s the problem for Republicans and especially Trump, who endorsed this weirdo fulsomely while comparing him favorably to Martin Luther King Jr.: Unlike Robinson’s strange sexual preoccupations, his antisemitism was no secret. He openly posted anti-Jewish and conspiratorial material on social media for many years, and refused to disown or apologize for those offenses. And by now nobody should be shocked that Trump and the MAGA Republicans, including his media claque, have lionized a Black Nazi.
The proliferation of White nationalist and Nazi-adjacent personalities at the highest levels of the Republican Party, directly attributed to MAGA and Trump, is pervasive. Candace Owens, a commentator dismissed from a right-wing website for her antisemitic ravings, was recently invited to headline a campaign fundraiser with Donald Trump Jr. Jack Posobiec, a right-wing operative repeatedly promoted by Trump, has collaborated with neo-Nazis and distributed antisemitic posts on social media. Wendy Rogers, an Arizona GOP state senator, just recently posted Nazi song lyrics on X, which was only her latest antisemitic emission.
The list goes on, including the nasty little pro-Hitler podcaster Nick Fuentes, who dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump, as well as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the “Jewish space lasers” theorist.
And then there’s Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host and close Trump confidant, who not long ago aired a show with a pseudo-historian whose work aims at absolving the Third Reich of responsibility for the Holocaust and whitewashing Hitler. Carlson, long a fan favorite of neo-Nazis here and abroad, approvingly echoed the recitation of revisionist lies.
This is a sickening phenomenon from which most Republicans — and too many in the media — have long averted their eyes. Trump may be the most reliable ally of the far right in Israel, but he represents a growing danger to American Jews.
Joe Conason is the editor in chief of NationalMemo.com and author of several books, including (with Gene Lyons) “The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Conason co-produced a 2004 documentary film, “The Hunting of the President,” based on the book. His new book is “The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism,” with a foreword by George T. Conway III.
From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2024
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