I don’t believe anyone thinks Trump cares about antisemitism
Jews in the sukkah of 2023: Jewish protest against the Israeli assault on Gaza on October 7, 2023, and Brown University
Jews have taken a lead role in the protest against the Israeli assault on Gaza. Eleven days after Oct. 7, 2023, progressive and anti-Zionist Jewish groups, including Jewish Voice for Peace, gathered roughly 400 protesters, many wearing shirts that said “Not in Our Name,” and occupied a congressional building. The Jewish Voice for Peace and its allies took over New York’s Grand Central Terminal. The first sit-in demanding the removal of companies from Israel was led by Jewish students at Brown University.
Even when protest has taken the form of Jewish religious observance, it often has been shut down. During the holiday of Sukkot, when Jewish students building sukkahs in Gaza opposing the war, at least eight universities forced the students to dismantle them or canceled their approval. (The universities said that the groups were not allowed to erect structures on campus.)
The Love of Homonationalism: The First Presidential Campaign of Donald Trump Against the Antisemitism of the Free and the Innocent
Conservatives used to hate Muslim immigration because it threatened the progress of gay rights in the West. The first presidential campaign of Donald Trump started this posture that became known as Homonationalism. At the Republican National Convention, Trump criticized the attack on the gay club in the state of Florida by the Muslim man. He said he would do everything he could to protect our L.G.B.T. citizens from the violent tendencies of foreign ideology. He came out with a proposal for the “extreme vetting” of Muslim immigrants which would exclude anyone who had not embraced a tolerant American society.
It should have been obvious to people that Trump was trying to divide the Democratic coalition with his concern for the safety of sexual minorities. During his first term, he stacked the courts with judges who had opposed the rights of gay and transgender people and rolled back some of their workplace protections. He used the backlash to get back to power and his administration is currently attempting to remove federal funding from almost everything with the term “L.G.B.T.” in it.
Trump’s treatment of L.G.B.T. 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. The mainstreaming of antisemitism has been done by Trump and his allies. Elon Musk, to whom Trump has outsourced the remaking of the federal government, is perhaps the world’s largest purveyor of antisemitic propaganda, thanks to his website X. (My “for you” feed recently served me a post of a winsome young woman speaking adoringly of “the H man,” or Hitler.) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, once said the unvaccinated had it worse than Anne Frank. The head of the anti-semitic task force shared a social media post by a neo-Nazi who was proclaiming that Trump had the power to take away Schumer’s “Jew card”. Trump dined with the hip-hop star and a white nationalist.