So says that noted Talmudic scholar, Rabbi Donald J. Trump.
“Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” he ordained this week. “They hate everything about Israel and they should be ashamed of themselves.”
These have been difficult times for American Jews, facing a wave of antisemitism from the far left because of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. And now, in one of Trump’s first acts since clinching the Republican presidential nomination, he has decided to attack American Jews from the right. Dayenu!
Compounding the insult was where Trump made it: On the podcast of his former White House aide Sebastian Gorka, who went to a Trump inaugural ball wearing the medal of Vitezi Rend, a far-right Hungarian nationalist group with Nazi roots. Gorka said he wore the decoration to honor his late father and isn’t a member of the hateful group; its officials have said otherwise.
“Right,” Gorka said as Trump went on with his rant. “Yeah … yeah.”
Trump disparaged millions of American Jews in the service of propping up his fellow aspiring autocrat Benjamin Netanyahu, the deeply unpopular Israeli prime minister. Netanyahu is clearly prolonging the war in Gaza because when the fighting there ends he will likely be voted out of power and held to account for the government failures that led to Oct. 7.
Because American Jews (like many Israeli Jews) want to end the Netanyahu nightmare, they hate their religion and the Jewish State? The chutzpah.
Now that Trump has locked up the nomination, we’re in for seven months of this ugliness before the election — and potentially four more years of it if that election goes badly. But fear not, dear reader: I will watch Trump so you don’t have to.
In the torrent of crazy and dangerous utterances coming from the man, we tend to bounce from one to the next. I will attempt to pause at week’s end to build a record of his greatest (or, rather, worst) hits so there will be no doubt about what Trump would do if returned to the White House. His apologists once said that Trump should be taken seriously but not literally. From experience, we now know to take him literally: He is going to do, or at least try to do, what he says.
So what did he say over the last week?
- He said that certain immigrants are “not people” but are in fact “animals” and “snakes.” He affirmed his view, seemingly lifted from “Mein Kampf,” that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He said his plan for mass deportations, modeled after “Operation Wetback” of the 1950s, “will be very evident” and “will go very quickly.”
- He saluted those who have been duly convicted of attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, calling them “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots.” Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, whom those “patriots” wanted to kill on Jan. 6, called that language “unacceptable” and told CBS News that he “cannot in good conscience” support Trump. In that principled refusal, Pence is joined by GOP Sens. Todd Young (Ind.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Mitt Romney (Utah).
- Trump suggested that he would support a nationwide abortion ban. “The number of weeks now, people are agreeing on 15, and I’m thinking in terms of that,” he told WABC radio.
- Trump said his former adviser Peter Navarro, who reported to prison this week after being convicted of contempt of Congress, was “treated very badly” by the legal system. And he said his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, convicted of bank and tax fraud related to his work for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine, is “another person that was treated badly, and he was a patriot.” The Post’s Josh Dawsey reports that Manafort will likely return as a Trump adviser this year.
- Trump went on a show hosted by the anti-immigrant British politician Nigel Farage, where he threatened to expel the Australian ambassador to the United States and said he might deport Prince Harry. But asked whether Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is a person he could negotiate with, Trump replied: “Yeah, I think he is.”
- Oh, and he said this at a rally in Ohio: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” He was speaking in the context of automobile imports. But given his history of provoking actual bloodshed, this was small reassurance.
As the general election campaign begins, Trump isn’t doing much campaigning. While President Biden has been barnstorming the country, Trump has visited only one battleground state since Super Tuesday, instead playing golf, making voluntary court appearances and granting interviews to friendly outlets from his Mar-a-Lago residence. This might be because he’s broke.
His campaign is struggling to raise both small- and large-dollar contributions, and donations have been diverted to cover his legal bills. Last Saturday’s rally had been planned for Arizona, but Trump’s campaign moved it to Ohio, where a group affiliated with Senate candidate Bernie Moreno agreed to foot the bill. Trump’s lawyers, meanwhile, said this week that he doesn’t have enough cash to post a bond for the $464 million judgment against him for business fraud, after asking about 30 insurance companies to underwrite the bond.
If Trump, for all his self-proclaimed business acumen, isn’t a good risk for 30 different insurers, how could he possibly be a good risk for the country?
On Wednesday, while Biden was at an event in Phoenix, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung issued a statement saying the president was “wandering” off the stage, “distracted by a mother and her baby. He isn’t all there, folks!”
This is the best the Trump campaign can come up with? Biden loves babies: Impeach!
“Well, folks, I have to tell you straight up,” Biden explained to the crowd. “I like you all, but I couldn’t resist that little baby.”
Trump routinely criticizes Biden for allegedly having a light schedule and declining mental faculties, but the presumptive Republican nominee struggled mightily at his only campaign event of the week.
“We want to have a rock-solid majority in the Senate,” he told the crowd. “We want to take over the House,” he added, apparently forgetting that the Republicans already control the House.
Trump used to boast that “I don’t use teleprompters,” even arguing that “if you run for president, you shouldn’t be allowed to use teleprompters.”
But when he suffered a teleprompter malfunction because of windy weather outside Dayton, he was lost.
“It’s good when you don’t have to use a teleprompter, because I can’t read a word and they’re moving around,” he complained.
Thirteen minutes later, he repeated that “we have no teleprompters.”
Seventeen minutes after that, he protested: “I can’t read this damn teleprompter. This sucker is moving around. … Don’t pay the teleprompter company!”
The unscripted Trump reminded America just how presidential he could be. He said he was asked not to bad-mouth his primary competitors, but “I don’t give a sh–.” He said the first name of Georgia prosecutor Fani T. Willis “is spelled ‘Fani’, like your a–.” He called California Gov. Gavin Newsom “New-scum” and “a bullsh– artist.” He said Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who like Trump is overweight, is just “too busy eating.” He invoked “Barack Hussein Obama” and called Biden a “dumb son of a …” and a “Manchurian candidate.” He complained about the removal of names of Confederate generals from military bases, and he objected to the Cleveland baseball team dropping the name “Indians.”
He tried to clean up one of the previous week’s messes, when he said “there is a lot you can do … in terms of cutting” Social Security and Medicare: “We won’t be cutting it.”
But the most disturbing part of the performance was thoroughly scripted. “Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated Jan. 6 hostages,” the announcer intoned as Trump came in. The campaign then screened a recording of Jan. 6 prisoners singing the national anthem, as Trump saluted.
In a Fox News interview with Trump that aired the next day, host Howard Kurtz asked Trump why he used “words like ‘vermin’ and ‘poisoning of the blood’” for immigrants and opponents, even knowing that it would be compared to the language of Hitler and Mussolini.
“Because our country is being poisoned,” Trump replied. He claimed that foreign “insane asylums are being emptied into the United States,” likening the incoming migrants to Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.”
In the same interview, Trump declined Kurtz’s invitation to “stop calling national news organizations ‘the enemy of the people,’” a Stalinist phrase, and, strangely, he said he had attacked host Jimmy Kimmel of ABC during the Oscars because he wanted to get even with “George Slopanopoulos.” Trump was angered that ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos had said two juries found Trump “liable for rape” — and Trump later in the week filed a defamation suit against the network. (A jury found that Trump sexually abused E. Jean Carroll, while the judge in the case said the rape claim against Trump was “substantially true.”)
Trump has filed many defamation suits over the years, almost all without success. That’s not surprising, because he’s usually the one doing the defaming. This week, when he wasn’t defaming migrants, he was defaming millions of Jews, starting with the highest ranking Jewish official in the United States.
Trump concluded that any Jew who votes Democratic “hates their religion” after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer gave a balanced and nuanced speech on the Senate floor on March 14 about the fighting in Gaza. Schumer condemned the spreading antisemitism on the left, seen in the demand for the “right to statehood for every group but the Jews.” He cited the “central role” Hamas plays in the bloodshed and said he was troubled by protesters who “decry the loss of Palestinian life but never condemn this perfidy or the loss of Israeli lives.”
But Schumer also said “Israel has a moral obligation to do better” and that Netanyahu, who rejects a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict, “has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.”
Schumer called for the ouster of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and declared it “unacceptable” for Hamas to retain any “meaningful power.” But he also urged the removal of extremist Israeli ministers who encourage “unacceptable vigilante settler violence in the West Bank.” And he called for elections in Israel.
To that, I say: Amen. Schumer undoubtedly spoke for many American Jews.
“I’m so glad Schumer said what he said,” my rabbi, Danny Zemel, an ardent Zionist, told me this week. Netanyahu “has abandoned the basic tenets of Zionism. … Bibi is a one-man wrecking ball, and he’s out for himself alone. His morals are the morals of self-preservation.”
Trump, too, operates by the morals of self-preservation alone. Like Netanyahu, he has every political interest in prolonging the bloodshed in Israel. Both men would make Israel a pariah and put it on a fast track to its destruction for their own gain. So let’s not quibble about what Trump meant when he promised a “bloodbath” if he loses the election. The bloodbath has already begun.
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