Is Donald Trump an Anti-Semite?

A revealing new interview peels back yet another layer.
Donald Trump.
If an appeal to bigotry wins him support, if it is in the interest of his personal power and fortunes, Trump will make those appeals without hesitation or shame.Photograph by Mark Wilson / Getty

When hundreds of hours of tapes from the Nixon White House became public, two decades ago, the full extent of Nixon’s prejudices, including his contempt for Jews, came into sharp focus. “The Jews are all over the government,” he told his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, at an Oval Office meeting, in 1971. What’s more, “most Jews are disloyal.” Nixon made allowances for some of his useful advisers, including Henry Kissinger and William Safire, but, he said, “generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards.”

I thought about those tapes a few nights ago while listening to “Unholy,” a weekly podcast hosted by Yonit Levi, the anchor of Channel 12 news in Israel, and Jonathan Freedland, a longtime columnist for the Guardian. Their guest was Barak Ravid, a veteran Israeli journalist who has just published a book in Hebrew, “Trump’s Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East.” Ravid brought Levi and Freedland an audio treat: excerpts of an interview he’d conducted with Donald Trump for the book. One tumbling rant was especially revealing: “People in this country that are Jewish no longer love Israel,” Trump told Ravid, at Mar-a-Lago last April. “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 Obama and 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. . . . When 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.”

In Israel, this soliloquy was hardly a sensation. What made headlines and led the evening news programs there earlier this month was Trump’s admission to Ravid that he had fallen out with Benjamin Netanyahu. For years, Netanyahu relied on his close relationship with Trump as proof of his stature and his influence in the U.S. During his last run at the premiership, his campaign put up billboards of the two men shaking hands with the slogan “Netanyahu: In a League of His Own.” Netanyahu made the case that he was the only politician who could have persuaded Trump to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the Golan Heights as its territory; to abandon Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran; and to cast aside the Palestinians, concentrating instead on the Abraham Accords, which have helped Israel normalize relations with the U.A.E. and Bahrain. But Netanyahu “made a terrible mistake,” Trump told Ravid, by congratulating Joe Biden on his victory in the 2020 election. It was unforgivably disloyal. “Fuck him,” Trump said, of Netanyahu.

It’s no surprise that Trump is willing to trash foreign leaders in the most vivid terms. What seems to have shocked some American readers is that he trafficked so fluently in traditional tropes about Jewish power, conspiracy, and disloyalty. Doesn’t he have a Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner? A daughter who converted and Jewish grandchildren? Didn’t he have Jewish lieutenants in both business and government, to say nothing of close relationships with Sheldon Adelson and the like?

Ravid told me that he did not emerge from his interview, or his over-all analysis of Trump, believing that the former President is an anti-Semite: “I think his state of mind is similar to the state of mind of many people here in Israel.” He pointed out that Trump’s comments about American Jews, Christian evangelicals, and the Times might as well have come out of the mouth of Netanyahu himself.

Ravid is no outlier. Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute, in Jerusalem, told me, “In judging a President’s relationship to the Jews, I take a pragmatic Israeli view. What matters aren’t a few thoughtless or even hateful comments but a President’s policies. Some of the most pro-Israel Presidents—Truman, Nixon—made anti-Semitic comments. F.D.R. is still beloved by many Jews even though he was a disaster for European Jewry. The Trump paradox is that he was a blessing for Israel and a curse for American Jewry. His Administration negotiated the Abraham Accords, Israel’s first genuine normalization agreement with Arab countries. And he existentially threatened the liberal order that allowed American Jewry to thrive as no other diaspora. That’s Trump’s Jewish legacy.”

Yonit Levi, of Channel 12 and “Unholy,” pointed out that the “default position” of Israelis is “to love the American President.” This was as true for Bill Clinton, who tried to forge a two-state agreement, as it was for Trump, who shared Netanyahu’s contempt for Palestinian aspirations. The exception was Barack Obama, who lost favor among Israelis partly because he failed to visit Israel on his early trip to the Middle East, partly because of the Iran deal, partly because of his insistence on pressing for progress with the Palestinians––and partly, Ravid said, because of his race. Netanyahu’s “smear campaign” against Obama, Ravid said, was successful to some extent because of its racist undertones. “There are some Israelis who still call him ‘Barack Hussein Obama,’ and not because of his middle name,” he told me. “We have a racism problem in Israel, just like in America.”

Some voices on the Israeli left, a diminishing tribe, told me that they did recognize distinct and troubling notes of anti-Semitism in Trump’s remarks to Ravid. Avishai Margalit, a philosopher and an early initiator of Peace Now, started our conversation by invoking an old joke. “I subscribe to Isaiah Berlin’s definition of an anti-Semite as someone who hates Jews beyond necessity,” he said. Trump, Margalit believes, qualifies: “I think we can allow that having negative stereotypes of other groups is, like it or not, a rather normal vice. But when the stereotypes become an obsession, and they are repeated again and again by someone, this is something else. And this is the case with Trump. His interview with Ravid shows him voicing a recurring theme of Jews as betrayers—Jews betraying Israel, Jews as betrayers by voting Democrat, and now saying ‘fuck Bibi’ because he thinks Bibi betrayed him by congratulating Biden for his win. This is really an obsession of his.”

The philosopher Moshe Halbertal, a professor at both Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, and the N.Y.U. School of Law, agreed. “That’s anti-Semitic,” he told me. “You can say that Congress supports Israel. But, when you ascribe that support, for whatever reasons, ideological or political, as a matter of control, that’s a fully anti-Semitic trope. Basically, what you’re saying is that this accomplished group of politicians is ‘in the hands of the Jews.’ And that’s anti-Semitic.”

Trump’s gestures of contempt for Latinos and Black Americans are so numerous that they have tended to eclipse his other prejudices. But he has not failed to shower his occasional attentions on Jews. In the 2016 campaign, Trump ran an ad attacking a “global power structure” showing images of three Jews: the financier George Soros, the then chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen, and the investment banker Lloyd Blankfein. One of Trump’s tweets aimed at Hillary Clinton (“Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!”) deployed images of the six-pointed Star of David and stacks of currency. Trump rebuffed the criticism; his social-media director said the star was that of a “sheriff’s badge.”

When I reminded Jonathan Freedland about Trump’s Jewish kinfolk and associates, he said that this was a “familiar type”—the philo-Semitic anti-Semite. He recalled Trump’s remark when he was in the casino business: “I’ve got Black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. 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.” (Trump later denied he said this.) Freedland compared Trump with Tony Soprano, who “is happy to speak disparagingly of Jews” but has Jewish associates, such as Herman (Hesh) Rabkin, who made a fortune ripping off Black musicians. “The type has existed for quite a long time, and has a history—the type who says he admires ‘their’ ingenuity and cunning,” Freedland said. He added, “The point about evangelicals—remember that their support comes not from a warm embrace but from looking forward to a day of rapture, when Jews are either converted or incinerated in a heavenly fire. Or take his notion that, if American Jews don’t support what he says, they are ungrateful and he can question their loyalty. He sees Jews as foreign and supplicants who should be grateful to him.”

Arielle Angel, who edits the left-wing magazine Jewish Currents, told me that, although she believes Trump is an anti-Semite, she didn’t see why his most recent comments were news. “I am surprised by the surprise,” she said, pointing to Trump’s remark two years ago that any Jew who votes for a Democrat is showing “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” She added that Trump’s use of a trope like “absolute power” over Congress obscured what should be a rational discussion of the influence of AIPAC and other such lobbying groups. In the Obama years, the Iran deal passed the Senate, despite lobbying from AIPAC and Netanyahu’s polarizing address to Congress. And, even if Trump or Netanyahu cannot comprehend it, American Jews who are critical of Israeli policy hardly regard themselves as un-Jewish.

This latest incendiary moment will pass, of course, only to be followed by the next outrage, the next racist remark, the next conspiracy theory, the next authoritarian maneuver. It would matter far less if Trump’s defeat in 2020 had relegated him to history. But the movement he has generated persists, and Trump could well return to power in an even more virulent, less tempered form. In the end, Trump is amoral. If an appeal to bigotry wins him support, if it is in the interest of his personal power and fortunes, he will make those appeals without hesitation or shame. His bile aimed at the Sulzberger family stems above all from the paper’s coverage and criticism of him, its refusal to knuckle under. He is mimicking the thinking of voters he hopes to attract. Trump’s politics have always been matters of pure personal interest, never principle or the good of the country.

As David Nirenberg, the author of “Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition,” put it, Trump’s remarks to Ravid were, above all, part of a political effort to “peel off voters from the Democratic Party,” to create divisions that work to his interest. The fact that Trump’s hateful stratagems of bigotry and conspiracy are consistent with authoritarian movements all over the world will never cause him a moment of hesitation. Why would they? What matters to Donald Trump is Donald Trump.