Trump's "baked in" bigotry
It was never just a sheriff's star.
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It is no coincidence that, as his 2024 presidential campaign comes to a close, Donald Trump is both coming out as an overt fascist and presiding over a Republican Party suffused with conspiratorial antisemitism.
Fascism and anti-Jewish bigotry have been integrally linked since the 1930s. Over the past several years, Trump has so successfully remade the GOP as a fascist political party that a leading “mainstream” Republican governor greeted the recent news that Trump is a secret admirer of Adolf Hitler as a non-event, offhandedly declaring on CNN that it’s “baked in” to his appeal. (Watch below.)
While Trump has declared himself to be the “protector” of the Jewish community at a time of rising antisemitism, he’s also spent the last eight years regularizing antisemitic conspiracism within the GOP and welcoming Jew haters and other bigots into the party.
In recent days, Trump, along with his cronies and followers, are making their extremism and bigotry more overt. This is particularly true where their rhetoric about Jews is concerned.
Trump recently railed that Jewish Americans are “cursed” and warned that Jews will bear “a lot of blame” if he loses the presidential election. He has also more than suggested that his support of Israel’s current government requires the quid pro quo of political support from Jewish American voters.
Many of Trump’s more devoted followers are even more explicit in their antisemitism.
Long before he was also outed as a Hitler fan, Mark Robinson (who gained the GOP nomination for governor in North Carolina with Trump’s enthusiastic support) was an open and notorious antisemite who traded in Holocaust denial. Marjorie Taylor Greene — one of Trump’s favorite House members – recently voted against a bill concerning antisemitism out of concern that the statutory language denied Jews’ purported responsibility for the death of Jesus.
And during last week’s Madison Square Garden rally — intended to send Trump’s “closing” campaign message to the nation — the same “comedian” who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” also “joked” about Jews’ supposed stinginess with money.
Antisemitic conspiracism is now so common in “mainstream” Republican rhetoric that it often goes unnoticed.
Last week, for example, GOP Rep. Tim Burchett spoke of the “money changers” in Washington — invoking a longtime favorite trope of antisemites — without even raising the eyebrows of a CNN interviewer.
More insidiously, and with the encouragement of Trump and his cronies, antisemitic conspiracies — often focused on wealthy Jews, like George Soros, a Hungarian-born Jewish Holocaust survivor and one of the world’s most successful hedge fund managers — have become central to “mainstream” GOP political rhetoric. None of this should be surprising, given the history of Trumpism.
The dogwhistles get louder
Donald Trump is a committed bigot at heart, and his worldview is deeply rooted in racism and religious stereotyping. His hatred and fear of non-European immigrants has been on open display since he announced his first presidential candidacy in 2015 in a “speech” laced with vitriolic rants about Latin American asylum seekers. Trump’s lifelong derision of Black Americans is never far from the surface, and has been starkly displayed in his now habitual dismissal of Vice President Kamala Harris as “stupid” and “low IQ.”
Like many barstool bigots, Trump has also long exhibited a set of reflexive stereotypes regarding Jews, who he claims to admire even as he repeatedly characterizes them as money-hungry connivers. No wonder that Trump bonded on the subject of Jews with neo-fascist ideologue Steve Bannon, who managed the final stretch of Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Bannon, a connoisseur of political conspiracism and authoritarian ideologies, has long worked with a panoply of contemporary European neo-fascists, including in Putin’s Russia and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. When he joined Trump’s first presidential campaign, Bannon immediately got to work inculcating antisemitic conspiracism into Trump’s rhetoric.
Bannon met little resistance to this project from Trump, who enthusiastically adopted rhetoric Bannon hoped would form the political foundation for a full-blown neo-fascist American ideology — one rooted in a claim that a “deep state” secretly controlled by “globalist financiers” (Jews) is destroying the nation from within. Under Bannon’s management, Trump closed out his 2016 campaign with a commercial picturing a series of leading bankers (including George Soros) overlayed with the voice of Trump promising to save the “working class” from “global special interests.”
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Bannon lost his official position as “chief strategist” for the Trump White House in August 2017. He was fired by then-Chief of Staff John Kelly in part to divert attention from Trump’s own then increasingly overt advocacy for white supremacism and racist violence, which was becoming a political headache for the administration.
The problem had reached the first of what would prove to be several heads in August 2017, one week before Bannon’s firing, when Trump described a motley crew of neo-Nazis and pro-Confederacy Trump fans as “very fine people.” This came after they had paraded through the streets of Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” — a reference to the then-obscure “great replacement” conspiracy theory Trump would come to popularize — and engaged in a violent riot culminating in a murder.
Bannon’s departure from the White House did not, however, slow the integration of antisemitic conspiracism into the GOP, reflected most prominently in the importation — and repurposing — of anti-immigrant and racist conspiracy theories that had originated in Europe to the United States.
Antisemitism goes mainstream
In recent years, Soros and his son, largely through their Open Society philanthropy, have devoted considerable resources to projects in the United States focused on issues like voting rights, civic engagement, and alleviating racial disparities in the justice system — initiatives Republicans revile. In addition, Soros has been a major contributor to Democratic candidates for office. So it was not difficult for GOP “thought leaders” like Tucker Carlson and Bannon to convince “mainstream” GOP politicians to join Trump and Orbán in demonizing Soros and mainstreaming an American variant of the “great replacement” theory.
By 2018, Republican leaders, including Kevin McCarthy, were enthusiastically disseminating propaganda that — much like Bannon’s 2016 “Jewish bankers” commercial — accursed Soros, sometimes together with other (frequently Jewish) “globalists,” of being part of a shadowy cabal directed at undermining the nation by “buying” elections. The next step was to join the neo-Nazis in accusing the “globalists” of systematically ushering hordes of Latin American asylum seekers into the nation to “replace” white Americans with fraudulent votes.
The fact that this imported version of the European neo-fascist theory was factually baseless, patently racist, and unmistakably redolent of antisemitism initially made some GOP “leaders” hesitant to fully endorse it. But that hesitancy quickly melted away as Trump made the conspiracy theory a staple part of his messaging. Now the “great replacement” theory — much like the claim that January 6 was a “love fest” — is a familiar component of GOP political rhetoric and is regularly invoked during Trump’s rallies and on Fox News shows.
In a typically cynical move, Trump has long taken to presenting himself as the valiant protector of Jews who feel their community to be under siege, including due to the conduct of the very rightwing extremists Trump has played a large part in legitimating. Trump began perfecting this strategy when he was still in the White House, sometimes perversely embracing antisemitic tropes — and even antisemites — at the same time he professed solicitude toward Israel.
One notably nauseating example was the invitation extended to John Hagee, a notoriously antisemitic fundamentalist minister, to a celebration of the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem. Hagee got his start in politics endorsing George Wallace, has declared that Hitler descended from “half breed Jews,” and suggested the Holocaust was intended to punish Jews for not returning to Israel.
Trump doubled down this cynical double game after he left office. As he felt more freedom to express the nature and scale of his extremism, he began openly associating, and even dining, with notorious antisemites, including avowed Hitler fans Nick Fuentes and Kanye West. At the same time, Trump claimed that Jews — and the state of Israel — must rely upon him for their survival.
The unleashing of bigotry
It is against this backdrop that Trump and his cronies have, with little attention from the mainstream press, routinely deployed antisemitic conspiracism during the 2024 campaign in ways not seen in this country since the days of Charles Lindburgh and the German American Bund before World War II. Trump’s deployment of antisemitism has often been overshadowed by his increasingly virulent racism and xenophobia, but the racism and the antisemitism are (as always) closely associated.
Throughout the campaign, Trump has routinely invoked the dual loyalty canard favored by notorious Jew haters. Trump describes Israel to Jewish audiences as “your country” and suggests Jews owe him support as a quid pro quo for his support of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
It is also now to be expected that every time Trump appears before a Jewish audience, he will refer to their supposed wealth and canniness with money. But Trump’s expressions of antisemitic bigotry extend well beyond mouthing such nauseating stereotypes.
Recently, Trump has gone farther and — whether deliberately or not — echoed Hitler’s warning that the Jews are in line for some form of collective punishment on account of their supposed “disloyalty.”
During a recent event (ironically) titled “fighting antisemitism in America,” Trump declared that should he lose the election, “[i]n my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do” with it. (Watch below.)
The implication was clear: If the Jews don’t bow in obeisance to Trump’s righteous demands, they will reap the whirlwind.
Furthermore, Trump is continuing to perfect his double game. Even as he touts his support for Israel, he and his cronies are employing grotesque antisemitic tropes and conspiracism to win votes from other constituencies. Michigan, with its large Arab American population, is ground zero for this repulsive election strategy.
A super PAC that has received funds from Elon Musk and from another PAC associated with Mitch McConnell is circulating web ads accusing Harris of favoring “Israel over us” and asserting that she is in the thrall of her Jewish husband. Musk’s message to voters he perceives to be potential antisemites on behalf of Trump is clear: Harris is controlled by the Jews.
But the breathtaking cynicism does not end there. The very same Musk-financed PAC is targeting Jewish voters and appealing to their fears of the very antisemitism Musk and Trump are seeking to foment with web ads suggesting, wholly falsely, that Harris has failed to “stand up” to antisemites.
Trump himself has been appealing to members of Arab American and American Muslim communities by asserting as he did on a visit to Dearborn last week that he is a “peace candidate” who will end the war in Gaza. But at the same time, when speaking to Jewish and Christian audiences he touts his support for Israel’s military actions in Gaza and Lebanon.
Trump has also empowered the father-in-law of his daughter Tiffany — Massad Boulos, a Lebanese Nigerian billionaire — to serve as his “envoy” to Arab and Muslim communities. Boulos has signaling to them that Trump (whose family has received massive financial benefits from Gulf monarchies) will offer less support for Israel than Biden has.
A lifelong grifter, Trump is perfectly willing to say contradictory things to different audiences, and more insidiously, to exploit and inflame the seeds of bigotry and suspicion in different communities of Americans to pit them against one another.
The fact that Trump is willing to present himself as a friend to the Jewish community even as he and his cronies fan the flames of antisemitic conspiracism to win elections is a red flag for a small community that been the target of instrumentalized hatred for hundreds of years. Trump is the kind of demagogue that Jews have encountered time and time again with consequences that are often damaging, and not infrequently catastrophic.
Just as importantly, it is now undeniable that if he again receives the keys to the White House, “mainstream” Republican leaders will offer no meaningful resistance to Trump’s now overt bigotry, including his antisemitism.
Trump and his cronies apparently have some level of concern that his increasingly overt embrace of authoritarianism and bigotry will repulse some voters. To that end, they are campaigning to discredit retired Gen. John Kelly, who once fired Bannon from his White House job to protect Trump, but has more recently — and wholly credibly —revealed Trump’s avowed admiration of Hitler. But those efforts are not being accompanied by any material change in Trump’s rhetoric.
For his part, Bannon, the man who first engineered the inculcation of conspiratorial antisemitism into Trump’s “movement,” just got out of prison after serving a sentence for defying a congressional subpoena seeking testimony regarding his (and Trump’s) role in the 2021 insurrection. Now a full-time propagandist who both propagates and profiteers from promoting the same flavor of neo-fascism that powered the 2016 Trump campaign, Bannon is once again fully in Trump’s good graces.
With Election Day coming tomorrow, there probably isn’t enough time for Bannon to prepare another campaign closing commercial for Trump warning of the dangers of “globalist” financiers. But should Trump win, America will be in for many more years of antisemitic dogwhistling (and worse) from the highest levels of power.
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That’s it for today
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The idea that Trump popularized the Great Replacement theory is flat out wrong. Fox News was preaching the conspiracy more than 20 years ago. I was a Fox News watching Republican back in the 2000s and they would frequently platform virulent racists such as Ann Coulter who would time and time again tell us that Democrats were diluting the white vote with Latino immigrants.
As for George Soros, that conspiracy theory became popular with the addition of Glenn Beck who would talk about Soros daily, along with Obama death panels, throughout 2009.
You guys really need to go back farther to cover the rot in the GOP.
I’d love to see an article, “Bannon or Trump: Who came first?” showing how both personas developed and the similarities. Just watched The Apprentice movie yesterday. They certainly seem to feed off each other.