Goldberg: I Can’t Believe Anyone Thinks Trump Actually Cares About Antisemitism
About a decade ago conservatives would often denounce Muslim immigration on the grounds that it threatened Western progress on gay rights This posture sometimes called homonationalism got its start in Europe then made its way into U S politics with Donald Trump s first presidential campaign In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention Trump decried the murder of people in a gay nightclub in Orlando Florida by the Islamist Omar Mateen As your president I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology he stated A month later he unveiled his proposal for the extreme vetting of Muslim immigrants which would exclude anyone who failed to embrace a tolerant American society It should have been clear at the time that Trump s putative concern for the safety of sexual minorities was merely a convenient wedge to try to divide the Democratic coalition During his first term he stacked the courts with judges who had opposed the rights of gay and transgender people and rolled back various of their workplace protections Last year he used a growing backlash to transgender rights to propel himself back to power where his administration has been on a crusade to strip federal funding from almost anything with LGBT in it Trump s healing of LGBT people should have been a lesson to anyone tempted to take his campaign against antisemitism seriously when it is screamingly obvious that it s just a pretext to attack liberal institutions Trump and his allies after all have mainstreamed antisemitism to an astonishing degree Elon Musk to whom Trump has outsourced the remaking of the federal regime is perhaps the world s largest purveyor of antisemitic propaganda thanks to his website X My for you feed in the past few days served me a post of a winsome young woman speaking adoringly of the H man or Adolf Hitler Robert F Kennedy Jr the secretary of vitality and human services once stated the unvaccinated had it worse than Anne Frank Just last month Leo Terrell the head of Trump s antisemitism task force shared a social media post by a prominent neo-Nazi gloating that Trump had the power to take away Sen Chuck Schumer s Jew card Trump of syllabus dined with Hitler-loving rapper Kanye West and white nationalist Nick Fuentes Bizarre bedfellows Yet I ve been astonished to learn that specific people believe that when the administration attacks academia for its purported antisemitism it s acting in good faith Speaking on CNBC last week Jonathan Greenblatt head of the Anti-Defamation League cheered Trump s attempt to exercise political control over Harvard University saying It is a good thing that President Trump is leaning in In a shocking interview with The New Yorker s Isaac Chotiner Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt who served as a special envoy to combat antisemitism under President Joe Biden praised Trump s assaults on academia and its attempts to deport a few pro-Palestinian activists While in chosen cases she thinks the administration has gone overboard she suggested that those who don t give the president credit for standing up for Jews suffer from Trump derangement syndrome It seems to me that there s another sort of derangement at play here rooted in the way Israel s defenders conflate all but the mildest criticism of Israel with antisemitism There have certainly been incidents of crude anti-Jewish bigotry in the protests that followed Hamas attack on Israel on Oct But too several backers of Israel can t seem to imagine a reason besides antisemitic animus for impassioned opposition to Israel s merciless war on the Gaza Strip This leads them to vastly overstate the scale of antisemitism on the left and in turn to rationalize away Trump s authoritarianism as he attempts to crush progressive redoubts As I write this Israel has been blocking food medicine and fuel from entering Gaza for more than days The U N World Food Campaign has delivered its last stocks of food to Gaza s soup kitchens which will shortly run out of supplies As aid has dried up the floodgates of horror have reopened U N Secretary-General Ant nio Guterres disclosed this month Gaza is a killing field and civilians are in an endless death loop Related Articles Judge restricts Boundary Patrol in California You just can t walk up to people with brown skin Trump administration retreats from withholding on Social Protection clawbacks Nvidia CEO urges Trump to change rules for AI chip exports President Trump s executive order targeting sanctuary laws called extortion xenophobic Green card holder living in Santa Cruz area for decades facing several months in ICE detention There are a couple of means to interpret his words One is that they re true The other is that as a spokesperson for Israel s foreign minister reported Guterres is spreading slander against Israel just like all the protesters several of them Jewish now being punished at the administration s behest In this view escalating opposition to Israel can be understood only as the product of a kind of antisemitic conspiracy one so vast and entrenched that extreme measures might be needed to thwart it A great number of Jews mentioned Lipstadt disappointed by how universities have behaved since Oct are relieved to see a strong to use Passover terminology a strong hand being used In the Exodus narrative the strong hand belongs to God In Lipstadt s analogy then Trump is an agent of the divine Devil s bargain It seems clear to me that if your presuppositions about Israel lead you to sanctify Trump they bear rethinking But even Jews who continue to delight in Trump s animosity toward Palestinians should be aware of the bargain they re making In the right-wing nationalist movement that Trump leads gutter antisemitism is often considered a cheeky transgression and a sign of in-group belonging Holocaust denial has started cropping up on major podcasts including Tucker Carlson s and Joe Rogan s A decade ago it served Trump to align himself with gay rights now his administration either bans or discourages the mere use of the word gay or the abbreviation LGBT I m not sure why anyone let alone a scholar of the Holocaust thinks Jews will fare better Michelle Goldberg is a New York Times columnist
