Jewish conservative calls Trump's embrace of ex-Fox News host 'direct threat' to campaign

Jonathan S. Tobin, the conservative editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Service, is demanding that former President Donald Trump renounce his ties to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson after Carlson hosted a self-proclaimed historian who peddled long-discredited Nazi propaganda about Adolf Hitler's purportedly peaceful intentions.

In his latest column, Tobin acknowledged Carlson's troubling history of mainstreaming right-wing cranks, but said that he crossed a major line with his promotion of self-proclaimed "historian" Daryl Cooper, who declared that Winston Churchill was a bigger "villain" in World War II than Hitler, the virulently anti-Semitic dictator whose regime murdered 6 million Jews in concentration camps.

"It is now incumbent on all decent people, and especially those on the right, to demand that Carlson no longer be treated as a mainstream figure," he argued. "Call it cancel culture, if you like, but the notion that someone who thinks it is acceptable or legitimate to question the truth about the Holocaust ought not to have access to a potential president, as Carlson appears to have with Trump, is entirely reasonable. That remains true even if Trump’s pro-Israel policies are the opposite of those of the former Fox News host."

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Later in the column, Tobin expressed some bewilderment that Trump had not already renounced Carlson when it was in his clear interest to do so. He then speculated that Trump "will always refuse to do what conventional wisdom tells him he must because he will be falsely condemned as an extremist and antisemite, no matter what he says or does."

Nonetheless, he urged Trump to make an exception for Carlson, or else it could cause his 2024 presidential campaign a fatal blow.

"Carlson’s actions and statements are a direct threat to his campaign and a frightening effort to mainstream the hatred of Jews," he concluded. "He must be put in his place, and condemned by Trump and Vance, if the Republicans are to defeat Harris and have a chance to make good on their promise to rid the government of the toxic disease of woke ideology that is empowering antisemitism on the left."