Donald Trump has always had an odd — and, frankly, offensive — way of talking to and about Jews. As much as he seeks to inoculate himself from any suggestion of antisemitism by invoking his Jewish son-in-law, Jewish (by conversion) daughter and Jewish grandchildren, he too often finds himself enjoying the support, and even the company, of outspoken antisemites and then has a hard time disavowing them.
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Preemptively blaming Jews, Trump crosses a dangerous line
But when it comes to his comments about Jews, Trump has managed to outdo himself — at a campaign event billed as condemning antisemitism in America, no less. “I’m not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss if I’m at 40 percent” Jewish support in the polls,” Trump said Thursday, likely overstating his backing among Jewish voters.
This was no one-off. Later that day, attending the annual summit of the conservative Israeli American Council, Trump raised the subject again. “If I don’t win this election … the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens, because at 40 percent that means 60 percent of the people are voting for the enemy,” he warned.
This is both of a piece with Trump past and crossing a hazardous new line, at a time when antisemitism in the United States is exploding and the broader American Jewish community feels vulnerable and besieged. In Trump’s previous comments about Jews and the election, he has seethed with resentment that ungrateful Jewish voters have failed to reward Trump for all the wonderful things he claims to have done for them and Israel.
Yet his latest remarks go beyond the typical Trumpian petulance and grievance. They threaten, if he does lose, and especially if he continues this line of argument, to unleash the fury of disappointed Trump supporters on Jews. It does not take much to imagine the backlash, and the violence, that could ensue. We Jews know something about being scapegoated.
Trump’s comments do not come in a vacuum.
Trump has long had an unnerving habit of bringing up the fact of people’s Judaism — sometimes mistakenly — on occasions when it seems irrelevant at best. “Who would have thought my top guys are Jews?” Trump observed to aides Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller and Jason Miller aboard Air Force One, according to the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman. (In fact, Jason Miller, as he told Trump, is not Jewish.) Last month, he described Josh Shapiro as the “highly overrated Jewish governor of the Great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”
Trump talks about Jews in ways that are offensively stereotypical even as they purport to be laudatory: “I’m here with my two Jewish lawyers,” Trump told Haberman in 2016, when she called to ask him about support he had received from former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.
“Don’t you think it’d be good for me to have a Jewish agent?” Haberman quoted Trump as asking an NBC executive as he negotiated a new contract for “The Apprentice.” During his 2015 speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Trump told the group, “Look, I’m a negotiator like you, folks; we’re negotiators. Is there anybody that doesn’t renegotiate deals in this room? Perhaps more than any room I’ve ever spoken to.”
As bad or worse, Trump consistently speaks in ways that suggest American Jews have dual loyalty to the United States and Israel. There was Trump speaking to Jewish Americans at a White House Hanukkah party in 2018: Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen “love your country. And they love this country,” he said. He called Benjamin Netanyahu “your prime minister” at a 2019 Republican Jewish Coalition event. In a 2020 Rosh Hashanah call with American Jewish leaders, Trump said, “We really appreciate you; we love your country also.”
Your, your, your. Wrong, wrong, wrong. We are Jewish Americans, not Israelis, and it is beyond insulting to imply otherwise. I love Israel, but my country is the United States.
And it is wrong, no matter how much Trump portrays it differently, to think of Jewish Americans as monolithic, single-issue, Israel-only voters, and support for his candidacy the requisite payback in a purely transactional enterprise. “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” Trump said in March. “They hate everything about Israel and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.”
Trump’s been on this rant about supposedly self-hating Jews for months now. He has no standing to lecture me or anyone else about what it takes to be a good Jew.
His ominous new turn is instructing other people that Jews like me would be at fault if he loses. And that is not just insulting — it’s threatening and dangerous.
We’ve seen this move before. It needs to be called out because it does not end well.