New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg says Trump’s real motives are clear behind his battle against antisemitism.
“About a decade ago, conservatives would often denounce Muslim immigration on the grounds that it threatened Western progress on gay rights. This posture, sometimes called homonationalism, got its start in Europe, then made its way into American politics with Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign,” she writes in the New York Times.
In his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Trump decried the murder of 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, by Islamist fundamentalist Omar Mateen, but then spent his term stacking courts with judges hostile to LGBTQ+ people and rolling back their workplace protections. Trump later rode a wave of MAGA backlash against trans rights all the way into the White House, and he’s been stripping “federal funding from almost anything with 'LGBT' in it.”
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The president’s betrayal of the LGBTQ+ community is a lesson to anyone “tempted to take his campaign against antisemitism seriously, when it is screamingly obvious that it’s just a pretext to attack liberal institutions,” writes Goldberg, who was born into a Jewish family in Buffalo, New York.
Goldberg notes the “derangement” at the way Israel’s defenders conflate all but the mildest criticism of Israel’s war on Palestine with antisemitism.” This, she says, leads Trump supporters “to vastly overstate the scale of antisemitism on the left and, in turn, to rationalize away Trump’s authoritarianism as he attempts to crush progressive” protesters, many of whom are Jewish.
Anti-Defamation League head Jonathan Greenblatt, for example, cheered Trump’s push to exercise political control over Harvard, saying, “It is a good thing that President Trump is leaning in.”
But “… if your presuppositions about Israel lead you to sanctify Trump, they bear rethinking,” says Goldberg, and even Jews who “delight in Trump’s animosity toward the Palestinians should be aware of the bargain they’re making.”
“In the right-wing nationalist movement that Trump leads, gutter antisemitism is … considered a cheeky transgression and a sign of in-group belonging,” she warns. Meanwhile, Holocaust denial is making an appearance on Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan podcasts.
A decade ago, Trump aligned himself with gay rights but now bans or discourages the mere use of the word “gay” or the abbreviation “LGBT."
“I’m not sure why anyone, let alone a scholar of the Holocaust, thinks Jews will fare better,” Goldberg said.
Read Goldberg's full Times essay here (subscription required).