BRET STEPHENS
The Table for Trump’s Antisemitic Banquet Was Set Long
Ago
Nov. 29, 2022
Opinion
Columnist
The former president, who is running
for his former office, invites to his home one of the most notorious
antisemites in the United States, who brings along a well-known Holocaust
denier. So far, to my knowledge, the only member of Donald Trump’s cabinet to
publicly condemn his former boss by name is Mike Pence. Nor, with a handful of
exceptions, have top Republicans or the major organs of right-wing media, and
even for them the indictment is mainly that Trump was sloppy about vetting his
guest list.
If he were to win again, all this would
be swept under the rug, just as it was the last time. This is the new normal.
We shouldn’t be surprised. The ground for it was laid long ago.
It was laid when Republicans normalized
Trump’s various ethnic bigotries. Remember when, during the 2016 campaign, he
said he couldn’t expect to get a fair trial in a fraud case from a judge with
Mexican heritage and Paul Ryan, who was then the speaker of the House, called
it a “textbook definition of a racist comment”? Ryan endorsed him anyway.
It was laid when
Republicans normalized Trump’s conspiracy theories. His birtherism should have
been disqualification enough. But the problem with conspiracy thinking is that
one theory always leads to another — and the ultimate conspiracy theory, the secret to the secret to the
secret, is that the Jews did it. People who can be led to believe
anything about anything will eventually believe anything about Jews.
It was laid when Trump and much of
conservative media made Republicans the party of immigrant bashers, something
they emphatically were not when their standard bearers were Ronald Reagan, the
Bushes and John McCain. “You too must befriend the stranger, for you were
strangers in the land of Egypt,” says the Book of Deuteronomy,
which helps explain why the words on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal were
composed by a Jewish poet. It’s also why a fanatic murdered 11 Jewish
congregants in a Pittsburgh synagogue in a plot to attack immigration.
It was laid when Trump called the news
media the “enemy of the American people.” It should not be controversial to say
the mainstream news media is frequently blinkered by groupthink, liberal bias
and self-flattering assumptions about its own goodness. But Trump forwent
critique for the demonization of an industry that, along with banks and
entertainment, is all but synonymous with “Jewish” among hardened antisemites.
It was laid when the conservative
movement came to despise intellectualism of any sort, including conservative
intellectuals. Though the moment was long in coming, it arrived when Fox News’s
Bill O’Reilly publicly ripped into the
Washington Post columnist George Will for the latter’s
unflattering review of the TV host’s idiotic “Killing Reagan” book, after which
Will lost his Fox News contract but retained his honor. (O’Reilly ended up
losing both.) The Trumpian right’s hatred of anything that conveys a sense of
erudition or culture is not in itself antisemitic. But it has a way of leaning
in that direction.
It was laid when “globalist,” another
dog-whistle word for “Jew,” became a slur used by the right. The notion that a
shadowy group of financiers who share an allegiance to no country, are in it
only for themselves and will gladly make the working classes suffer for their
profits is the theory behind the “Jews will not replace us” chant adopted by the neo-Nazi
marchers at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
It was laid when
management at Fox News repeatedly stood by its star bigot even as he championed
replacement theory, went after the “vulture capitalism” of a prominent Jewish
hedge funder and showered praise on Kanye West as a “bold” truth-teller while reportedly editing out
Ye’s antisemitic comments.
It was laid when the right repeatedly
looked the other way at Trump’s persistent overtures to the radical wing of the
party, whether it was tweeting antisemitic images, lying about David Duke or refusing to repudiate white supremacists in
Trump’s first debate with Joe Biden — telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and
stand by.” This foul courtship has always been part of Trump’s playbook, which
is why his most recent dinner should come as a surprise to nobody.
It was laid when pundits on the right
justly decried antisemitism on the left — the noxiousness of an Ilhan Omar or
a Jeremy Corbyn or the anti-Zionists whose unhinged
criticisms of Israel so often mimic ancient antisemitic tropes and behaviors —
while remaining practically mute to the antisemitism of a Marjorie Taylor Greene,
a Viktor Orban and the QAnon right. “First cast out the beam out of thine
own eye” may be a Christian phrase,
but it behooves a conservative movement to clean up its own house when it comes
to antisemitism before it considers the mote in the eye of its opponents.
A final note: I was
reluctant to write this column, because I think the former president is a spent political force and because, as Patti Davis observed on Monday, often the best way
to defeat a bully is to ignore him. But the bigotries Trump has unleashed are
not spent and cannot be ignored. And they won’t be defeated until they are
unequivocally denounced by whatever is left of honorable conservatism.