Right-Wing Critics of Antisemitism Keep Strikingly Silent About Trump
But this fish rots from the head.
WAY BACK IN 2004, I wrote a book titled The Return of Anti-Semitism. Things had gotten bad enough that it was necessary to offer a fresh warning about the recrudescence of the world’s oldest hatred, I thought.
Little could I imagine then the grave condition at which we have arrived today.
Antisemitic incidents and violent attacks against Jews in the United States, including some resulting in death, are at an all-time high. A thinly veiled hatred of Jews is metastasizing on the anti-Zionist left. And an explicit and unveiled hatred of Jews has exploded on the MAGA right.
Examples abound, but nothing rivals Tucker Carlson’s decision to lend his platform, and his audience of millions, to the unabashed white supremacist and Hitler-lover Nick Fuentes, whom Carlson fed one softball question after another during an October 27 interview that has so far been viewed 5.9 million times on YouTube and 18 million times (supposedly) on X. And it is perhaps even more alarming that once-reputable conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation have leapt to Carlson’s defense.
To be sure, prominent figures on the right have spoken out in the strongest terms against the new wave of antisemitism. Addressing the Republican Jewish Coalition annual gathering in Las Vegas, Senator Ted Cruz said that he had “seen more antisemitism on the right” in the past half year “than I had in my entire life. . . . If you sit there with someone who says ‘Adolf Hitler was very, very cool,’ and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you are a coward and you are complicit in that evil.”
Senator Lindsey Graham called the Fuentes interview “a wake-up call” for the Republican party. “How many times does [Carlson] have to play footsie with this antisemitic view of the Jewish people and Israel until you figure out that’s what he believes?”
Randy Fine, a MAGA Republican congressman from Florida, called Tucker Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America.”
According to the Trump-supporting conservative pundit Rod Dreher, “Carlson has, by this squishy-soft interview, introduced Fuentes into the right-wing mainstream. It is legit freaky that we have reached this point in American life. It is, in fact, Weimar America time.”
In a lengthy tweet, the Hudson Institute scholar Michael Doran, a self-described three-time Trump voter, called the defense of Carlson by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts “dishonest, bigoted and stupid. . . . A movement that can’t recognize and reject blatant antisemitism has no moral core and no future.”
Such forceful denunciations of antisemitism by Republicans politicians and MAGA conservatives are all to the good—a sign of health in the political system, of antibodies swarming to fight a disease. But something critically important is missing from their indictment. These figures conspicuously omit any accounting of the prime force fostering a political climate in which all forms of hatred—very much including antisemitism—flourish: President Donald J. Trump.
“I HATE MY OPPONENT and I don’t want the best for them,” is what Trump said at Charlie Kirk’s funeral. Raw hatred is the lifeblood of Trump’s politics and integral to his political appeal. He began his presidential bid in 2015 famously railing against Mexican immigrants. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. . . . They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Fast-forward to today.
What Cruz, Graham, Fine, Dreher, Doran, and others decline to mention is that Trump remains on good terms with the openly antisemitic Tucker Carlson. What they seem to have forgotten, or—far more likely and far worse—are unwilling to say, is that it was Donald Trump who in 2022 dined at Mar-a-Lago with Fuentes (although he claimed it was without knowing who Fuentes was), along with his fellow antisemite, the rapper Ye.
It was Donald Trump who nominated to the post of special counsel of the United States Paul Ingrassia, a man who boasted of having “a Nazi streak” in his character. When Ingrassia’s nomination was headed for certain defeat in the Senate, Trump retained him in his current White House role as a liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.
It was Donald Trump who called bankers “shylocks,” and then claimed not to know it was a derogatory term—just as he (falsely) claimed that he didn’t “know anything about” the antisemite David Duke after Duke endorsed him in 2016.
It was Donald Trump who nominated Ed Martin to be one of the most powerful prosecutors in the country, and then, after the Senate declined to consent to that appointment, withdrew the nomination but offered him the consolation prize of a high-ranking position in the Justice Department, where Martin currently works as the pardon attorney and director of the department’s “weaponization working group.” As a private citizen, Martin gave an award to white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who said that “Hitler should have finished the job.” It was this Jew-hater whom Martin praised as an “extraordinary man” and “extraordinary leader.”1
Over at the Pentagon, the press secretary of the department is Kingsley Wilson, a prolific purveyor of antisemitic conspiracy theories. She has resurrected a historic antisemitic canard against Leo Frank, a Jew who was lynched by a mob in Georgia in 1915. “Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl. He also tried to frame a black man for his crime,” is what she wrote in 2023 and reiterated the following year. This is hardcore stuff.
Trump himself may not be an antisemite, even as he harbors some antisemitic notions (e.g., Jews are money-grubbing) and regularly repeats some antisemitic tropes (e.g., Jews hold dual loyalties), but he has been a font of hatred writ large, and a facilitator of vicious antisemites. With the White House imprimatur behind him, he commands a vast audience, with millions of fervent true believers in its ranks. If there has been a normalization of antisemitism in America, it comes in no small part from the very top.
On this critical point, Senators Cruz and Graham and the other GOP anti-antisemites who have spoken out since the Fuentes interview are curiously disingenuous. Their denunciations of antisemitism are a welcome development but their diagnosis of the problem is woefully incomplete. Trump, Rod Dreher writes, “could go a long way in stifling the growth of this evil by forthrightly denouncing it.” That is true, but it is also an unsubtle evasion. How about first asking Trump to stop spreading antisemitism via his associations and appointments? Denouncing it would be a good step after that. Michael Doran, who boasts of voting for Trump three times, is dead right: A movement that can’t recognize and reject blatant antisemitism has no moral core. Ted Cruz is also dead right: If you say nothing, then you are a coward and complicit in the evil.
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