Trump and US Jewry

I’M OFTEN asked if I believe US President Donald Trump – his arrogance, dishonesty and incivility aside – is good for the Jews. After all, as many have pointed out, Trump has been “very good on Israel.” And therein lies the paradox: Although it’s undeniable that the Trump administration has stood squarely with the Jewish state, his appalling practice of invoking and validating a deep-seated fear of the “other” that pervades some segments of American society should be sounding alarm bells within the Jewish community.

To be sure, President Trump has ushered in a much more positive era in US-Israel relations than was witnessed under the Obama administration. Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, has been a steadfast defender of Israel, openly impugning that organization’s routine condemnation of Israel for fabricated human rights violations.

While the rest of the world was denouncing the IDF for its handling of the Hamas-inspired violence on the Israel-Gaza border earlier this year, Haley defended Israel at the UN, asserting that “No country in this chamber would act with more restraint than Israel has.” In June, moreover, the US withdrew from the so-called UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, citing that body’s chronic anti-Israel bias.

On Jerusalem, Trump, refusing to back down in the face of Palestinian threats of violence, kept his promise to move the American Embassy to Israel’s capital, righting a historical injustice. The move represented a de facto recognition of the legitimacy of the Jewish people’s historical and religious claims to the holy city. Arguably, Trump may be the most pro-Israel president in history. It would be absurd, therefore, to suggest that he isn’t good for the Jews, right?

Of course, those who hold a favorable view on the question of Trump and the Jews have had to rationalize Trump’s pathetic response to the white supremacist conclave in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year when he insisted there were “very fine people” among the neo-Nazi marchers. Problem is there’s no way to defend what he said, which served only to bolster the white supremacist movement.

Many progressive Jews I know believe that Trump’s moral obtuseness on Charlottesville was evidence that he’s a closet antisemite. Such claims, however, don’t account for the fact that not only is he pro-Israel, but in addition, he has populated his administration with several Jews and has embraced his daughter’s conversion to Judaism. Besides, focusing on Trump’s alleged antisemitism misses the point – it is the racists, xenophobes and antisemites who feel at home in Trump’s America who are the real threat to Jews and other minorities. This threat is best understood in the context of Trump’s attacks on immigrants, particularly his language when speaking about immigration. Last January, in a meeting with lawmakers, he suggested that the US should try to attract immigrants from countries such as Norway (read: white-skinned) while keeping out people from “shithole countries,” by which he meant Haiti, El Salvador and poor African countries.

More recently, Trump explicitly advocated for depriving undocumented immigrants of their due-process rights, arguing that these “invaders” should be immediately deported without a chance to appear before a judge. Just as outrageous was his mid-June tweet in which he described undocumented immigrants coming into the US as an “infestation.” The president’s calculated use of this word casts these non-white migrants, many of whom are fleeing insufferable poverty and violence, into the same category as rats, termites and cockroaches.

These odious characterizations (oh, and let’s not forget those Mexican “rapists”) are meant to dehumanize, making a clear distinction between the “very fine people” and the less-than-human “other,” who, to paraphrase another of Trump’s tweets, will arrive here and debase our American culture.

Trump’s pronouncements on immigrants provide red meat for that part of his base to whom racial and ethnic diversity are anathema due to a deep-rooted fear that white people are losing ground in America. And while Spanish-speaking migrants are the cause of these Trump loyalists’ vexation and resentment in the short term, eventually (if not presently) Jews and other minorities may also be viewed as “outsiders.” Now that the leader of the free world has essentially normalized the dehumanization of a certain class of people, is it so far-fetched to think that the mainstreaming of antisemitism and other forms of bigotry may not be too far behind?

No, this isn’t 1939 Nazi Germany, and we should avoid comparisons to the Holocaust as some, regrettably, have already made. Yet at the same time, we Jews, who have been dehumanized and demonized throughout our history, should not underestimate the intolerance and hostility that has been unleashed from out of the shadows of American society.