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bigtree

(92,036 posts)
Tue Apr 15, 2025, 03:57 PM Apr 2025

It being anti-Semitic actually meant you lose federal funding support, we'd have to stop paying Trump. [View all]

...take away all of his millions in tax exemptions.

The president who made slurring Jewish Americans a standard in his presidential campaigns isn't a credible judge of Harvard's or any other institution's treatment of ethnicity.

Donald Trump’s anti-Semitism controversies: A timeline
https://www.timesofisrael.com/donald-trumps-anti-semitism-controversies-a-timeline/

Trump’s long history of trafficking in antisemitic tropes
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/17/trump-history-antisemitic-tropes/

Trump’s Crocodile Tears for the Jews
This selective sensitivity to anti-Semitism allows Trump to have dinner at his Florida home with bigots such as Kanye “Ye” West and the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes one day, then assail liberals for anti-Jewish prejudice the next. And it allows some hard-left activists to rightly critique the white nationalism seeping into mainstream Republican politics, yet simultaneously justify anti-Semitism that’s cloaked in the guise of “anti-Zionism”—with some even adopting the terminology of the neo-Nazis they claim to oppose.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/08/trump-anti-semitism-comments-fox-news/679459/

Trump Goes Full Anti-Semite, Unloads on American Jews in Wildly Bigoted Rant
Prior to being elected, Trump suggested to a room full of Jewish people that they “control” politicians through money. He tweeted an image of Hillary Clinton’s face atop a pile of cash next to the Star of David and the phrase, “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” And he capped off his campaign by releasing an ad featuring the faces of powerful Jewish people with an ominous voiceover about them comprising a “global power structure” that has “robbed our working class” and “stripped our country of its wealth.”

Later, upon moving into the White House, and just six months after his claim of being the least anti-Semitic person in the universe, he refused to condemn a group whose ranks included neo-Nazis. In August 2019, in an attempt to win over (???) Jewish voters, he declared “they don’t even know what they’re doing or saying anymore.” Speaking at the Israeli American Council in Hollywood, Florida, that December, he “dipp[ed] into a deep well of anti-Semitic tropes,” suggesting, among other things, that Jews only care about money.

In clips aired on the Unholy podcast, the former president—who may or may not make another run for office in 2024—went on a lengthy rant about how American Jews supposedly aren’t loyal enough to Israel, invoking a longtime anti-Semitic trope about Jewish people and allegiances to another countries. Speaking to journalist Barak Ravid, who appeared on the podcast, Trump said: “There’s people in this country that are Jewish that no longer love Israel. I’ll tell you the Evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country. It used to be that Israel had absolute power over Congress and today I think it’s the exact opposite, and I think [Barack] Obama and [Joe] Biden did that. And yet in the election, they still get a lot of votes from Jewish people…which tells you that the Jewish people, and I’ve said this for a long time. The Jewish people in the United States either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel. I mean, you look at The New York Times, The New York Times hates Israel, hates them, and they’re Jewish people that run The New York Times, I mean the Sulzberger family.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/12/donald-trump-anti-semitism-jews-israel


What Donald Trump has said about Jews
The president has helped spread dangerous anti-Semitic conspiracy theories
One of the oldest stereotypes about Jews is that they are all money-grubbing chislers — a prejudice that was at the root of countless medieval pogroms. Trump has implied or straight-up said this many times. In a 1991 book, John O'Donnell, the former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino, said Trump had told him: "Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day." He later called O'Donnell a "loser" in an interview with Playboy, but allowed that, "The stuff O'Donnell wrote about me is probably true."

In December 2015, Trump gave a speech before the Republican Jewish Coalition and said, "I'm a negotiator like you folks, we are negotiators ... Is there anybody that doesn't renegotiate deals in this room? This room negotiates them — perhaps more than any other room I've ever spoken in." He also asserted they wouldn't support him because he couldn't be bought: "You're not going to support me because I don't want your money. Isn't it crazy?"

In July 2016, he tweeted an image attacking Hillary Clinton, originating from the notorious cesspit 8chan, displaying a star of David over a pile of cash.

Probably the worst anti-Semitic propaganda Trump has pushed is the classic conspiracy theory that Jews control world politics and the global economy. In the last days of the 2016 campaign, he rolled out an ad featuring three rich Jews — then-Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and financier George Soros — over a narration decrying "those who control the levers of power in Washington," and the "global special interests" who "partner with these people who don't have your good in mind." The obvious implication is that Hillary Clinton is a cat's paw for a global Jewish conspiracy. As Josh Marshall writes, "These are standard anti-Semitic themes and storylines, using established anti-Semitic vocabulary."
https://theweek.com/articles/835714/what-donald-trump-said-about-jews

Antisemitism Increased Under Trump. Then It Got Even Worse.
The radicalization of the Republican Party has helped white nationalism flourish. Antisemitism started increasing in 2015, when Donald Trump came on the political scene and electrified the far right, then spiked during his administration. Trump is now gone, but the Republican Party has grown more hospitable than ever to cranks and zealots. Two Republican members of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, spoke at a white nationalist conference this year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/29/opinion/antisemitism-post-trump.html

________________________

The Real Purpose of Trump’s Executive Order on Anti-Semitism

Donald Trump has a knack for taking some of humanity’s most problematic ideas and turning them on their head to make them even worse. He has done it again. On Wednesday, he signed an executive order that will allow federal funds to be withheld from colleges where students are not protected from anti-Semitism—using an absurdly defined version of what constitutes anti-Semitism. Recent precedent and the history of legislative efforts that preceded the executive order would suggest that its main targets are campus groups critical of Israeli policies. What the order itself did not make explicit, the President’s son-in-law did: on Wednesday, Jared Kushner published an Op-Ed in the Times in which he stressed that the definition of anti-Semitism used in the executive order “makes clear what our administration has stated publicly on the record: Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”

Both Kushner and the executive order refer to the definition of anti-Semitism that was formulated, in 2016, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance; it has since been adopted by the State Department. The definition supplies examples of anti-Semitism, and Kushner cited the most problematic of these as the most important: “the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity”; denial to “the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor”; and comparing “contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” All three examples perform the same sleight of hand: they reframe opposition to or criticism of Israeli policies as opposition to the state of Israel. And that, says Kushner, is anti-Semitism.

One does not have to be an anti-Semite to be an anti-Zionist, but one certainly can be both an anti-Semite and an anti-Zionist. Trump, however, has inverted this formula by positioning himself as a pro-Zionist anti-Semite. He has proclaimed his support often for the state of Israel. His Administration’s policies, which have included moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and, more recently, declaring that the U.S. does not view Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal, have pleased the state of Israel, especially its most militantly expansionist citizens. Over the weekend, however, at the Israeli American Council National Summit, in Florida, Trump gave a speech that brimmed with Jewish stereotypes: Jews and greed, Jews and money, Jews as ruthless wheeler-dealers. “A lot of you are in the real estate business because I know you very well,” he said. "You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all.” It was the kind of stuff that requires no definitions, op-eds, or explanations—it was plain, easily recognizable anti-Semitism. And it was not the first time that Trump trafficked in anti-Semitic stereotypes. The world view behind these stereotypes, combined with support for Israel, is also recognizable. To Trump, Jews—including American Jews, some of whom vote for him—are alien beings whom he associates with the state of Israel. He finds these alien beings at once distasteful and worthy of a sort of admiration, perhaps because he ascribes to them many of the features that he also recognizes in himself.

The new executive order will not protect anyone against anti-Semitism, and it’s not intended to. Its sole aim is to quash the defense—and even the discussion—of Palestinian rights. Its victim will be free speech.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-real-purpose-of-trumps-executive-order-on-anti-semitism

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