search
Micha Odenheimer

Is Trump Good for the Jews?

Forget about everything else for now, no matter how important, and lets ask straight up: Is Trump good for the Jews? Trump’s Jewish supporters are convinced he is. They will cite the move of the United States Embassy to Jerusalem, the signing of the Abraham Accords during Trump’s presidency, and his declared willingness to take on Iran. But there is a shadow side to Trump and the Jews, that should trouble Jewish voters especially when looking at his influence in the long term.  Although it’s tempting, best not to go into this election with our eyes wide shut. 

Trump is not just another candidate. He is a disrupter, who has changed the face of American politics and especially of the Republican party. If he is elected once again, the changes Trump has brought to the political culture will likely continue to shape the United States long after he himself has left the scene. And that is a mighty scary thing. 

First of all, there is Trump’s MAGA isolationism, combined with his tolerance and even admiration of dictators. Trump has expressed his admiration for Putin –and his disdain for NATO — more than once. 

Tellingly, during the debate with Kamala Harris, in a seemingly unguarded moment, Trump referenced Hungary’s authoritarian president, who has a close relationship with Putin, as a leader who appreciates and admires him. Orban, out of all the world’s leaders?  

Influential MAGA Republicans, along with Trump himself, have said that they will not support Ukraine in its push back against the Russian invasion. Instead, they will use their leverage to broker a deal that rewards Russian aggression with a piece of Ukraine. 

Trump, so it seems, would abandon U.S. ambitions to spread democracy in the world. We are at a moment in history when democracy, which thirty years ago seemed as if it was  advancing across the globe, now seems to be receding. In countries like China, Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and India, autocratic leaders have rolled back democracy’s gains.  New technologies, such as facial recognition software and AI are adding powerful tools that governments can utilize to control and punish dissidents and protestors.Meanwhile, Trump has sown distrust and disrespect for  elections in the United State.  His demand of Georgia’s Secretary of State to “Just find me 11,000 votes,” his request of Pence that he refrain from certifying Biden’s victory and his relentless “Stop the Steal” campaign have weakened democracy and its norms. Democracy has been good for the Jews. Its collapse has nearly always signaled ominous tidings for our people. 

Which brings us to another aspect of the Trump phenomenon: his practice of singling out individuals and groups for humiliation and demonization.  The Talmud says something surprising about name-calling. Along with embarrassing someone in public, inventing an ugly nickname is considered a sin so severe that it is considered tantamount to murder; whoever does it loses his portion in the world to come. Name calling, besides being juvenile, is an act of violence. 

A direct line links the insulting names Trump calls his opponents and the smears he attaches to entire societies or groups, including illegal immigrants, who he has accused of murder and rape, Haitians–they steal and eat pets, and the countries of the Global South, which he termed “sh–thole countries.” . I don’t know that Trump himself will ever turn on the Jews —although his statements preemptively blaming “the Jews” if he loses, are concerning. He has also, to be fair, promised to “remove the  Jihadists and the Jew haters.” But his pollution of political discourse with the language of bullying and blame is a disaster waiting to happen for the Jews once Trump himself leaves the scene. We are magnets for blame and we tend to attract slurs. Nothing good for us will come from the normalization of degraded speech in American politics. 

Trumpism after Trump–that’s where the real danger lies. A Republican Party in the thrall of men like Tucker Carlson, who recently used his platform, “Tucker on X”, to expand by millions the audience of Darryl Cooper, a holocaust-denying, Hitler-admiring antisemite. Carlson called Cooper “The most important popular historian working in the United States today.” That’s only the latest  in an ongoing stream of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel comments made by Carlson. Carlson is one of the most important figures in the Republican party today and was one of the headline speakers at the Republican convention. Vance and Trump have so far refused to criticize or condemn Carlson’s promotion of holocaust denial or his other anti-Israel and anti-Semitic statements.

The deeper, underlying problem is that the MAGA world is addicted to conspiracy theories. Whether it’s the Deep State, pedophile rings run by Hollywood and the Democratic elite, or voting machines made in China, conspiracy theories are always just below the surface of the Trumpiverse. MAGA Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, famous for the Jewish space rays that she implied might be starting California fires, outdid herself this week, claiming that the Democrats controlled the weather. The most famous MAGA conspiracy theory, Q-Anon, seems to have faded away but it may just have been folded into the broader Republican Party. Trump, incidentally, never repudiated even the most extreme versions of Q-anon. 

The problem is that If you dig deep into just about any conspiracy theory you will eventually find the Jews. This was true of Q-anon as well –scratch the surface, you found the globalists and Soros, drill deeper and Rothschild gushed out. Conspiracy theories revolve around groups of powerful, hidden cabals. Why look further than the Jews? 

None of this is to deny that the Democrats are also not a tallis made entirely of blue. The anti-Israel bias of the radical wing of the Democratic Party, the “Woke” younger generation and their pro-Hamas demonstrations, cancel culture and the excesses of Critical Race Theory and Ethnic Studies programs which erase and distort Jewish history are indeed worrisome and need to be pushed back against.  But let’s not ignore the frightening warning signs in what is now the mainstream of the Republican party. Let’s not pretend, as some of the people I grew up with do, that Trump is the political messiah of the Jews. Trump’s MAGA represents an unprecedented breakdown of political and cultural norms. That’s dangerous. Because the twilight of democracy? Not good for the Jews.

About the Author
Micha Odenheimer is a journalist, rabbi, and social entrepreneur. Micha founded the Israel Association or Ethiopian Jews, the first advocacy organization dedicated to changing absorption policies, and Tevel b'Tzedek, an Israeli organization working with impoverished subsistence farmers in the Global South. Micha has written for numerous publications, including Haaretz, the Washington Post, and the Jerusalem Report from Ethiopia, Somalia, Iraq, Burma, Bangladesh, Indonesia and other countries.
Related Topics
Related Posts